Blog

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

After forty years in Washington, DC, I just moved eight thousand miles away and am settled in Jerusalem, Israel. Every morning when I finish my morning meditation I think, “This is the best thing I could have brought with me”…and the easiest. It required no luggage, airfare, shipment or space.…

“Why should we all use our creative power? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, bold and compassionate. Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it. And what is the purpose of existence Here or Yonder but to discover…

Thirty years ago, statistics showed that fifty percent of the college graduates in the United States were women. Thirty years later, women still only hold a small percentage of leadership positions in government, business and industry. This means that women’s voices are not heard in the decisions that most affect…

Recently John Christoffersen wrote in the Huffington Post that mothers are still struggling to calm their children after the Sandy Hook disaster. Even though the children have been moved to a different school and have received the best counseling available, the children and teachers are still spooked by loud noises,…

When you look at health statistics for children, there is a heartbreaking trend toward more disease during the past two decades. Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control tell us that 9.5% of children currently have asthma, 8.4% have been diagnosed with ADHD, and a shocking 18% are not just…