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Healing Your Two Hearts

Women are known to have a higher emotional intelligence (EI) than men, and that’s a good thing. In fact, for many of us, empathy, intuition, compassion and sensitivity to other people’s feelings are the beacon lights that guide us through each day.

Yet this emotional sensitivity and openness can backfire when we’re under stress. Researchers tell us that a woman’s brain is wired differently than a man’s, making women more susceptible to stress than men even when exposed to the identical triggers. As just one example, women in the military are twice as likely to develop PTSD than men.

Being a Woman First

Women in combat are facing enormous challenges as they return home. Reintegrating into family life, finding housing, finding a job, being a mom and figuring out how to be a civilian again can be daunting.

Yet underlying all of these seemingly disparate roles a woman plays in the world is the role of being a woman. If a woman veteran can nourish her most essential self, the subtle essence of feminine beauty, softness and pride, she has come a long way in finding her place in the world.

From the Blues to Bliss: Transcendental Meditation is Transporting Long Island Women

Let’s face it ladies: the statistics are grim. There’s a plague of stress in the United States. It’s in our schools, our workplaces and our homes. Studies show that one out of four visits by women to physicians involves a prescription for depression. Women today claim to be, on average, forty percent less happy than women forty years ago. There are now more women than men in the workforce, but we are more susceptible to stress at work. Heart disease, already the number one cause of fatality among women, is increasing.

Intuition from the Field of Consciousness

Consciousness is a fairly controversial topic in the field of psychology. But rather than go into all that right now, let’s just talk about consciousness as an aspect of the individual that we often refer to as ‘wakefulness’. That which makes us conscious is that which makes us awake and attentive.

Yearning for More: The Quest for Enlightenment, Part One

Most of us have experienced a deep yearning for something more in life—a sense that there is more than the status quo of work, school, relationships and family. We wonder: what is this life about? My search started intensely at the age of 13.

As the daughter of a minister, I shared my father’s commitment to ethical action and altruism. In junior high and high school I did volunteer work for programs of poverty and illiteracy alleviation, working with disadvantaged children. But it was clear that the unhappiness I felt in my own life was affecting my ability to help others. I remember once working with a child who came from a troubled background, and as he cried, I cried too—in empathy, sympathy, and bewildered frustration. I thought: how can I truly help this child and family? I wondered—how can I help myself, full of anxiety and depression? If I myself was suffering and unaware of how to find more fulfillment, how could I help others to live more fully?

Protecting Young Women from Anxiety

Last year I spent some time helping a high school girl (let’s call her Katya) with her writing. Katya is an excellent writer, college-bound, but at the beginning of her critical junior year, she choked with anxiety and didn’t turn in a major paper for her honors English class. And got a D for the first semester.

As a family friend, I was enlisted to help build up Katya’s confidence, calm her anxiety, and boost her writing skills. Believe me, I felt a great deal of empathy for Katya. I remembered all too clearly my own teenage years, when writing a term paper was a matter of hacking my way through thickets of negative thoughts, quicksands of panic and swamps of self-doubt. Sometimes I would work so hard at writing a major paper that I would practically have a nervous breakdown.

How Women Inspire Men

It’s so easy to love a baby. The super-soft skin, the miniature fingers and toes, and the smell—pure heaven. Just being around a baby makes all of us—men or women—feel more gentle, more protective, more tender.

Yet it seems that girl babies, in particular, have a greater effect on their dads—they make them feel more generous, to the point of donating more to charity and paying their employees more. And this is backed up by research. In a fascinating new study, researchers found that the mere presence of female family members, even infants, was correlated with more giving. Male chief executives tended to raise wages for employees after the birth of a daughter, while the birth of a son caused executives to reduce wages for their workers (likely to claim more resources for his growing family).

Why 30 Is Not the New 20

I just heard a great TED talk “Why 30 Is Not the New 20,” by Meg Jay, Ph.D. Dr. Jay, who is a clinical psychologist and author of the book, The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now, believes it’s a huge mistake for young adults in their twenties to think that they have all the time in the world to start their real lives. The decade that seems to be all about postponing careers, postponing marriage and postponing childbearing is evolving into an extension of childhood, yet according to Dr. Jay, the twenties are not only the pivotal decade of a person’s life, but claiming your 20s “is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world.”

Why are the twenties the pivotal decade of a young woman’s life? Dr. Jay gives the following research statistics: eight out of ten “aha” moments that make your life what it is have happened by the time you’re 35. More than half of Americans are married or are dating their future partner by 30. The first ten years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you’re going to earn. Female fertility peaks at age 28 and things get tricky after age 35. She concludes, “So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options.”

TM, Stress and Addiction

On the 4th of July I watched the fireworks from the Oakland hills, where I enjoyed a panoramic view of the entire San Francisco Bay area. From that broadened perspective, the chaos of civilization looked like a perfectly coordinated organism, the ever-flowing traffic the veins and arteries, the pulsing Golden Gate bridge display as the heart, the firework displays of at least nine different townships firing off like neurons in what appeared to be a beautifully coordinated synchrony.

Sometimes I wish that researchers and doctors—who focus so intently on a particular fragment of the human body, on one broken or painful area—could draw back and see our minds, bodies and emotions from a wider perspective, as a perfectly functioning organism with every part working in perfect harmony with the other.

Onward, Upward, Inward

When I was in fourth grade in the 1960s my parents gave me a volume that I still keep in my library, Living Biographies of Famous Women. My parents felt that my sister and I should be able to go to college, have a brilliant career, and rise to the top, just like Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, and Florence Nightingale, all featured in my book. And they wanted me to know that I could be as successful as any man in that pre-women’s liberation era, when few women had careers.

I think I took something away from reading their stories that was different from what my parents expected, though. I noticed that while these women were indisputably powerful and successful, many of them lacked one important thing: a satisfying personal life. Only one, Madame Curie, the famous scientist who did pioneering research on radioactivity, seemed to have a happy family life and a full career at the same time.