August 1, 2025
Each of you is perfect the way you are ... and you can use a little improvement. Shunryū Suzuki
Dear Friends,
First day of August- another invitation just turned the corner….
This week flew by again- and that is part of the story here- each day a smaller fraction of our lives… Relativity rules. Yet moments hold more meaning when we simply pay attention.
I have been leaning heavily on Shankar and Hidden Brain- it is not laziness- I promise. It is that these last few have been so good. I recommend listening to this pod- then go to the website. Our narratives bring meaning to our experiences. It is not what happens that matters. What holds power is how we integrate the story and the meaning of the story into who we are. Some events so significant that they require us to rewrite our story. Spend time with your own creation myth.
Speaking about being on repeat- couples therapists give the same advice over and over again. So read the article from the NY Times Practice appropriately
As an old guy- I appreciate the concept of “joyspan”. A different way to think of longevity. Not counting years- counting and encouraging the “joy”.
Lastly- another reflection from David Whyte. Disappointment “ is inescapable but necessary; a misunderstood mercy and, when approached properly, an agency for transformation and the hidden, underground engine of trust and generosity in a human life…Disappointment is the friend to transformation”
We will be disappointed in our lives, our partners, our joys and each other. Let us use that disappointment to create something more true to ourselves.
May you be free from suffering.
Bill
You 2.0: Change Your Story, Change Your Life
Hidden Brain
We all tell stories about ourselves, often without realizing we’re doing so. How we frame those stories can profoundly shape our lives. In our latest You 2.0 episode, we bring you a favorite conversation with psychologist Jonathan Adler. He shares how to tell our stories in ways that enhance our wellbeing.
Listen on Apple Podcasts:
The Relationship Advice Couples Counselors Swear By
Eight therapists share lessons they find themselves repeating again and again.
Joyspan: The secret to Aging Well
Disappointment
is inescapable but necessary; a misunderstood mercy and, when approached properly, an agency for transformation and the hidden, underground engine of trust and generosity in a human life. The attempt to create a life devoid of disappointment is the attempt to avoid the vulnerabilities that make the conversations of life real, moving, and life-like; it is the attempt to avoid our own necessary and merciful heartbreak. To be disappointed is to reassess our self and our inner world, and to be called to the larger foundational reality that lies beyond any false self we had only projected upon the outer world.
What we call disappointment may be just the first stage of our emancipation into the next greater pattern of existence. To be disappointed is to reappraise not only reality itself but our foundational relationship to the pattern of events, places and people that surround us, and which, until we were properly disappointed, we had misinterpreted and misunderstood; disappointment is the first, fruitful foundation of genuine heartbreak from which we risk ourselves in a marriage, in a work, in a friendship, or with life itself.
The measure of our courage is the measure of our willingness to embrace disappointment, to turn towards it rather than away; the understanding that every real conversation of life involves having our hearts broken somewhere along the way and that there is no sincere path we can follow where we will not be fully and immeasurably let down and brought to earth, where what initially looks like a betrayal eventually puts real ground under our feet.
The great question in disappointment is whether we allow it to bring us to ground, to a firmer sense of our self, a surer sense of our world, and what is good and possible for us in that world, or whether we experience it only as a wound that makes us retreat from further participation.
Disappointment is a friend to transformation, a call to both accuracy and generosity in the assessment of our self and others, a test of sincerity and a catalyst of resilience. Disappointment is just the initial meeting with the frontier of an evolving life, an invitation to reality, which we expected to be one particular way and turns out to be another, often something more difficult, more overwhelming and strangely, in the end, more rewarding.
-from Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words
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Great stuff, Bill. And I love "joyspan," too! May we all embrace that expansive outlook!