Over the past year I made a conscious choice to step out and speak my truth around my battle with Cancer and the loss of my marriage. My sole intention has been to be honest and authentic about my struggles and imperfections with the hope that my story will inspire and heal the many people who suffer silently.

Read on.

Your ability to reach your dreams has nothing to do with your own capability or your lack of ambition. Your dreams were most likely suffocated or temporarily terminated by the influential people in your life.

Dreams are illustrations in the book your soul is writing for you. —Marsha Norman

In this video I talk about how our dreams become crushed throughout our lives, and why this needn’t stop you from going after what you want.

Watch “Let’s Dream Together” here.

My quest for love happens daily on both a personal and professional level. I seek to understand its meaning conceptually, and I’m constantly learning how to actualize it in my interpersonal relationships.

Love has been an ongoing inquiry for me because like you, I need love like I need air and water. While I know I can “survive” without love, research in Neuroscience has taught me that healthy development, and adaptive adjustment rely on this fundamental human capacity.

Perceiving love as a need rather than a desire (or something to aspire to) allows me to approach it like I would any other aspect of my well being. As something essential and necessary.

Love has become a practice for me, not a goal or requirement to feel whole.

Like yoga, meditation, or playing an instrument, if I continually practice love I see myself progressing and deepening my understanding of its nuances. I follow the fundamental guidelines that others before me have established, but create my own version and unique style that authentically represents me.

Love only becomes a struggle when I practice with the wrong people, try and perfect it, or resist the humility that comes with realizing I will never master it.

Here are five truths I have come to appreciate about love while being a practitioner:

I know I can’t and will never conquer love. I am a student of love because it teaches me things about myself and the world regularly.

Looking at love as something to practice means that I’m never at its mercy. It is up to me to have it or give it at anytime.

Real love is not in disguise. It’s not always obvious, but in its true form it’s transparent.

Fear and love are synonymous. I don’t have to be afraid of love because I am fully aware of the fact that it will bring me both joy and pain.

Love is an inside out practice. Loving myself is a prerequisite for feeling loved and loving others.

Making love a practice not only makes it available to you at all times, but it opens the door to your own personal inquiries about love.

How do you show it? How do you know it? How do you feel it?

Develop your love practice this week, and remember to make it an exploration and an investigation, not an acquisition.

A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. 

Being a people pleaser has been a chronic issue for me for years, but I think I’ve finally nailed how to stop this self-effacing behavior. When I look back I could attribute it to many things. Maybe my tendency to please others stems from being the 3rd child, and having a brother who was ready to pounce on me at any moment. Or maybe it’s connected to the approval and love I endlessly sought from my neglecting parents. My selflessness may also be rooted in my deep fear of rejection and strong desire to be accepted. Read on.

When I’m taking pictures I lose all self-consciousness about how I see things, and can completely immerse myself in what I believe to be true and perfect. It’s my photo, my angle, and most importantly my point of view.

You may not know it, but your perspective of the world is extremely valuable. How you see things is just as important as how you feel. An even more important concept, however, is that your ability to share a different perspective from your own is one of the most valuable qualities you can have. Taking it even one step further, your ability to see things from another person’s perspective is an essential skill in maintaining a healthy relationship. Read on.

Deciding to discard something that has some potential for rejuvenation may not be too hard in every day life, but when it comes to a relationship it’s pure torture.

Relationships get broken just like the items in our lives, but we can’t just throw them away without much thought. We spend torturous hours deciding whether it’s worth saving, or if it’s reached it’s expiration date. It’s hard to know when a relationship is beyond repair, and when it can still be salvaged.

I have had both friendships and love relationships in my life that I have had to discard, and I have had to repair quite a few as well. I’m of the mind that most things are repairable up to a certain point, but sometimes retiring a relationship is in the best interest of everyone involved.

Repairing a relationship requires energy and work, and it entails re-investing in something that may be fixable, but also has the potential of breaking again in the future. 

Trashing a relationship (and I use that word metaphorically) is a big decision and requires you to say goodbye to something to which you’ve become attached, and might miss. In the face of this, repairing might seem easier.

If you are in the ambivalent state of whether to keep or dump a relationship that is broken, damaged, or disintegrating, here are 5 questions to consider that will help you decide if it’s salvageable.

Can it be repaired?
This is the million-dollar question, and it actually generates another question. What does it mean to repair? Piecing a relationship back together is not the same as sewing up a hole in an item of clothing. To know if your relationship can be mended you will need the three C’s: commitment, change, and conversation. Both parties need to be fully committed to trying, change has to be visible and apparent, and an ongoing open conversation about the process is essential. This is no guarantee, but if these three C’s are in place, you at least know you have the right kit to start putting things back together. Make a list of what changes you expect to see, rate your commitment on a scale of 1-10, and schedule a time to check in on the process weekly.

How much will it cost?
There is always an expense with repair, and it’s definitely “cheaper” to throw something away. Asking yourself how much you are willing to re-invest in your relationship will help you determine if it makes sense. The cost will be related to your own emotional and physical energy, what you will need to sacrifice or give up to make a repair, and what price will you pay if it turns out to be irreparable. Make a list of all the things you need to work on and how much time you are willing to give the process. Then determine what aspects of your life will be affected by putting in the time to see if the relationship is salvageable. For example you may have to give up time spent with friends and family, or you might consider that you will be taking yourself “off the market” for a period of time eliminating your options for meeting someone new.

Can it be replaced?
We live in a society where most things seem replaceable, and this is true for our relationships as well. We might be quicker to dispose of something if we feel like there is something better or more out there. On the flip-side you might find that you convince yourself that there isn’t something better keeping you stuck in your relationship due to fear not choice. Instead of thinking about replacing the person, consider the qualities and characteristics you would want to replace (or not). It’s kind of like upgrading to a new model of an item. You take the basic qualities that you found useful and beneficial, and let go of the ineffective and purposeless pieces. Can these newer parts be integrated into your present relationship, or is it impossible due to fundamental issues that can’t be changed?

What have you invested?
You may have already invested a lot into this relationship. The more time and energy you have put into this situation, the greater loss you will feel in retiring it. No matter what you decide, there is probably some amount of joy you drew from being with your partner, so avoid looking at it as wasted time either way. What are the payoffs you have gotten so far? What would you need to gain to invest further? Sound investments come from really understanding what we are buying into, and what we expect to get in return. Relationships can be seen in the same way as a financial investment. If you feel like you haven’t been getting a good return on your time and energy, then you might have over-invested in something that isn’t paying off. Your investment should match the return, or the return should enrich you enough to feel that the investment was worth it.

Will it break again?
This is directly related to trust. Past behavior is often the best indicator of future behavior unless major changes are made. It’s not like you can buy insurance on your relationship, so the organic uncertainty of whether things will ultimately work out is something you will need to tolerate. There are no guarantees when it comes to relationships so what can you draw on to find the faith to go forward?  You can use a risk to loss ratio here. Accepting the fact that your relationship may break again, or ultimately not be repairable, combined with all of your answers to the above questions will give you a start. Sometimes we need to let things become “garbage” before letting them go so we don’t have to face the uncertainty. You may want to really exhaust things to the point of no return, or cut your losses and not take the chance.

Consider all the facts, and listen to your heart. The answers will come.

Images of a neuron-firing brain, and a diagram of a body in a high state of stress would represent a more accurate depiction of human love.

The feelings that you experience when you fall in and out of love stem from neuro-chemicals in your brain that generate all the symptoms familiar to anyone in the beginning or end of a romantic relationship. Dopamine and Norepinephrine are the hidden motivators that drive your “crazy” behavior and obsessive thinking when you are maneuvering through the limerence or heartbreak of a romantic relationship. I don’t think it’s a fluke that the words “pine” and “Dop” are embodied in these two words.

These neurons spike when you are pursuing a new or lost lover, and become depleted when your efforts are futile. So whether you are in enraptured or ensnarled, your brain will do what it is biologically designed to do…to seek the reward of love, and feel depressed when you don’t get it.

Here are three research-based facts to help you manage love:
The same part of the brain that gets activated with physical pain also lights up with social rejection. This means that your body doesn’t know the difference between when you touch a hot stove or have been dumped by your partner. All you will know is that you are in pain, and it will feel like it will last forever. So next time you tell yourself that you shouldn’t be so upset about a lost love, remember that your brain is signaling your body and you need to listen.

When you first “fall” for a lover your brain also produces a high amount of dopamine, which is connected to reward seeking behavior. This explains the infatuation and obsessive experience that happens in new love with the main goal being reciprocated feelings from the other person. When this goes well the addictive high of love kicks in until the Dopamine wears off, and the relationship falls into a phase of love that many couples refer to as boring. When the romance falters or doesn’t work out, the Dopamine spikes even higher driving the spurned lover to protest and go into a state of high anxiety. Recognizing that much of what you are experiencing is chemically driven will help you manage the behaviors and feelings of love.

Ever feel like you want to kill your partner? Turns out that love and hate are also closely linked in the brain. It is neurologically and physiologically possible to love someone and hate them at the same time. This experience can drive you crazy, and leave you feeling really confused. Know that it’s normal to fluctuate in your feelings when you’re in love, it doesn’t always have to be bliss for it to be good. Loving and hating at the same time is a normal human experience, and everyone feels these divergent feelings for people we love.