Native American Women Writers: An Interview with Hertha D. Sweet Wong, PhD

Hertha D. Sweet Wong, PhD, has been instrumental in bringing the voices of Native American women to mainstream attention. When she was a graduate student studying literature in the 1980s, she made a pivotal decision to follow her passion and delve into…

Percilla Herrera: A Passion for Helping Girls and Women Thrive

Percilla Herrera is a soft-spoken but dynamic young woman with a passion for helping girls and women thrive. Her insights into the challenges that women experience were sparked in her youth. The oldest of six children, she was raised by her single mother in an underserved neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Living the Good Life At Age 93

In writing, almost any teacher will tell you that the most elusive quality to teach is voice. It takes a certain maturity for a writer to open to the wonder of her own mind. And when you read someone who knows who they are and isn’t the least bit apologetic about it, it makes for great reading.

Photographer Juliet Jarmosco, Career Mom of Six, Finds Dream Job and Inner Peace

A few years ago, Juliet Biros Jarmosco was a corporate working mom in her 30s living a fast-paced life.

“It all looked perfect from the outside, like my husband, Darryl, and I were living the American Dream,” she says. At that time the Jarmoscos had four beautiful children under the age of seven (now they have six), were spending time in Hawaii, and lived in a 4000-square-foot house on an acre of land a mile from Lake Michigan.

College 101: Major in Yourself

With schools opening across the US this month, parents and kids are scrambling to get ready with the right books, clothes and skills. If you’re preparing for your first year […]

To Live a Creative Life

If you Google the words “creative life,” you will come face to face with a quote which— even though it has become a popular meme (infographic that has gone viral)—is still startling in its message: “To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.”

Although he’s rarely given credit, these words were written by contemporary author Joseph Chilton Pearce, whose fan page you can “like” on Facebook. Pearce is the author of groundbreaking parenting books such as The Crack in the Cosmic Egg and The Magical Child, which I might write about in the future, but here I want to talk about his statement about creativity.

Nurses Need Nourishing Too

I just learned a new term: “compassion fatigue.” This is what nurses, professional caregivers and first responders experience when they’re too tired, too sad and too stressed to feel normal compassion for their patients. It’s also known as secondary traumatic stress (STS) and is characterized by a gradual lessening of compassion over time.

Having watched many nurses in action during my parents’ multiple short hospital stays for stroke and pneumonia, I’ve been amazed at the quality of care and comfort that most hospital staff give every day, 24/7.

Preventing Depression Through Spiritual Growth

For me, adolescence was a time of seeking for spiritual guidance. My family wasn’t religious—my father, who had been raised Roman Catholic, didn’t want to saddle us kids with the restricting yoke of formalized religion. Nevertheless, our parents instilled in us a strong moral compass, and we were taught to respect God, nature and other human beings no matter what their race or religion.

That worked for me as a child, when Mom and Dad made me feel safe and had all the answers. By the time I was a teenager during the turbulent 1960s, I needed something more. I explored Eastern philosophies, wrote to the Knights of Columbus to take a correspondence course in the Catholic faith, and tried to meditate by staring at a candle.

Learning to Accept the Good and Forget the Guilt

When I met Gladys Kimtai, an orphan from Kenya who had recently finished sending herself through an American college on a track scholarship, I was immediately struck by her beauty, her poise and her humble nature. When I heard her story of transformation, I felt I had to share it.

Gladys was born the youngest of six children in a small village in Kenya. Her parents died when she was two, so her grandparents raised the children in a tiny house with no beds.

The Transcendental Meditation Technique and the Journey of Enlightenment: An Interview with Author Ann Purcell

Ann Purcell didn’t start out to write a book. A teacher of the Transcendental Meditation technique since 1973, she taught Transcendental Meditation and advanced courses in many countries around the world. She also wrote songs about her experiences of transcending.

“My best songs are those that were totally unplanned and just suddenly, spontaneously bubbled up inside of me—the melody and the words seemed to write themselves,” she says.