Tag: Life
Learning to Tell the Truth, Even If It Hurts
Early childhood experiences led me to believe that my real opinions and feelings didn't matter. I learned that the quickest way to gain approval was through compliance and agreeableness, and that I was responsible for regulating people's emotions for them, even if it meant abandoning myself. Whatever would cause less friction, keep the peace, or ...
Nostalgia: Reverence for the Moments that Shape Our Lives
“Sometimes you will never know the value of a moment until it becomes a memory.” – Dr. Seuss It's crazy how smallest things can trigger a sense of nostalgia. Like the smell of cigarette smoke, reminding you of the first time you moved out of home to live in that dingy apartment that you adored, ...
My Grandmother’s Memoir: Finding Meaning for the Past, Present, and Future
I never really knew my grandmother. But that all changed when I discovered she had begun writing her own memoir. It turned out that nine notebooks that made up my grandmother's memoir had been sent to my mom in Canada from the Philippines several years ago. They were handwritten in English and Tagalog, collecting dust ...
Enjoying vs. Enduring Life — Which One Are You Doing?
Last week, Vancouver was hit with its first snowfall of the season. As expected, the rain-accustomed city basically shut down when the snow reached its peak; bridges started to close, buses stopped running, cars got stuck, and classes got cancelled. And, sure enough, my lovely but prone-to-worry mother sent me a flood of texts urging ...
Challenging Your Assumptions and the Need to Predict
In an effort to minimize risk, we all have the tendency to predict possible outcomes and plan accordingly. To make these predictions, we can't help but draw from past experiences and preconceived notions of the world in order to keep ourselves safe. And this is not always a bad thing. Predicting and falling back on ...
A Meditator’s Advice for Measuring Progress with Anxiety or Depression
When it comes to mental health challenges like anxiety or depression, it can be tricky to measure progress in a tangible way than, say, weight loss. Progress is often slow, subtle, and incremental, and the changes we make on the inside are often barely detectable on the outside (at first). It's incredibly frustrating to feel ...
Accepting the Consequences of Living Honestly
After years of struggling with perfectionism and people-pleasing, I'd made up my mind to live differently: to focus on living in alignment with my values, regardless of how people responded. I gave up trying to control how people reacted to me (which perfectionism and people-pleasing were attempts to do), focusing, instead, on the only thing ...
Embracing the Messiness of Life
Having just moved into a new apartment, I naturally have the desire to keep it clean and tidy. My kitchen is a prime example: when I first moved in, I restricted my movements to keep it as spotless as possible, only to realize this was holding me back from actually doing anything. In order to ...
Overcoming Perfectionism: A Designer’s Mindset
Last week I spontaneously took a sample introductory course to UX & UI design, since both are increasingly becoming more and more relevant to my field of communications. I found it very stimulating, not just in terms of course content, but in terms of how designers approach failure. As the course progressed, I found myself ...
Top 3 Life Lessons from Partner Dancing
Last weekend I attended my first three-day congress for a partner dance style called Brazilian zouk, which consisted of back-to-back workshops and nightly dance parties known as "socials". Only since returning home have I begun to process the full weight and significance of this experience, which I'd like to share with you now. It sounds ...
Celine Diaz: Real Talk 