Flecti Non Frangi: To be bent, but unbroken. This idea is the heart of our work at Lodestar -- how do we realize and acknowledge the harm, and be deliberative and aspirational as we move through it. How do we emerge not only unbroken, but having experienced intratraumatic healing and growth? Lately I’ve been wondering about this more collectively. Will we emerge from this time of unrelenting toxic stress bent but stronger? Kinder? Wiser? More patient? More understanding? More

Dear Everyone: Recently, I've fielded a lot of requests for presentations and tools on resiliency. Specifically in healthcare and education, there is appropriate, growing concern from administrators about the emotional health and well-being of their staff, and a desire for experts to provide them with resiliency tips and tools that may help. All this begs an important question: are we facing an epidemic of resilience-deficiency? Or are we simply asking too much? 2020 has been

Dear Everyone: We each have an important decision right now, one that many of us may not even recognize we face: Do I Amplify or Mitigate? 2020, a year that defies all description and categorization, is leaving tremendous damage in its wake. There is a light on the distant horizon, and right now each of us can choose how we want to show up in the months ahead. Every one of us has the terrible power – even if only by default – to amplify the pain. Or we can commit to becoming

Dear Everyone: Open handed, open-hearted listening is one of the greatest acts of grace and human kindness we can offer. Without these, the temptation to reduce “others” to mere caricatures of their true selves is almost automatic – we do it reflexively, without consideration for the real cost to the person we are dismissing and diminishing, nor the injury to our own humanity. Frankly, I am too damn old to still be re-learning this lesson. Yet here I am, once again humbled by

Dear Everyone: A couple weeks ago I wrote the first in a three-part series about resilience and then, predictably, got sidetracked. Thanks to those of you who hung in there, and even bigger thanks to those of you who yelled at me, “EAT YOUR FROG!” In part one of our reservoir metaphor, we talked about the Weaponization of Resilience and the critically important work of recognizing when the spillways that dump OUT of our “Resiliency Reservoir” have been open too much and for t

Sculpture by Alexander Milov Dear Everyone: I got a phone call very late last night. Normally, I turn my phone off early - it's part of tending to my personal resilience - but it has been a week, I was still awake, and the phone was still on. Experientially, late night phone calls are rarely a good thing - I’ve lived long enough that even the thought makes my heart sink. So, when I heard the buzz last night and glanced down to see the name of an old friend I’d not spoken wit