When a friend begins to angrily talk about someone else, you likely feel torn. On the one hand, you know that under the anger, your friend is feeling some version of hurt, scared, and/or sad and so you want to offer support. On the other hand, your own integrity and care for others comes up when you hear harsh judgments. You don't want your willingness to listen to be construed as agreeing with judgments of others or the situation and you don't want encourage violent speech.

The most helpful place to start is with self-connection. Ask yourself if you have the resources to be a...

I grew up in the interior of Alaska. The colors there are beautiful and strange: dusky black-teal spruce trees, brilliant orange and pink sunrise and -set, white snow, and blue-black-gray shadows from the moon. I know the forest floor there, the bright red berries, the different mosses and lichens, the peeling birch bark and bursting aspen, the dirty-cream of puffball mushrooms, the curling fuschia of fireweed and then their white seedy fluff. I know what it feels like to step on the peat, to dig in red-brown clay, to sink into the powder of the snow up to my calves. It is the landscape of...

Your survival depends on intimacy. As Thomas Lewis talks about in his book, "A General Theory of Love", an infant's life depends on intimacy with a caregiver to regulate basic physiological and emotional functioning. This regulation through connection continues throughout life.

However, if you are like most people, you have had formative experiences in which you moved toward intimacy and got the message that it wasn't okay and possibly that it was dangerous. At some point in becoming more and more intimate with a partner or other close person in your life, these previous experiences...