The Wise Mind Group

09/02/2026

When we’re feeling anxious, trying to convince ourselves not to be anxious through logic and reason just doesn’t work. Most the time it makes the anxiety even worse.

When my six year old wakes from a scary dream, I don’t ever try to reason with her that the dream wasn’t real because all she needs in that moment is the quality of my warm, reassuring presence. I bet you already know how to do this and do it all the time with people and animals in your life. Turning it inwards takes practice, but you will get better and better at it over time the more you practice. Anxiety isn’t a problem to be solved, it’s just your nervous system mistaking the mail carrier for a dangerous burglar. You already know how to meet it 💗💗

08/27/2026

I recently had the honor of being a guest on the Curable podcast, Like Mind, Like Body. If you’ve ever been told, “Don’t worry!” or to “just relax,” you know that’s about the most unhelpful advice possible when you’re feeling anxious or scared. instead, it’s much more useful to use bottom up approaches where we use our bodies to communicate we are safe to our nervous systems vs trying to think our way into feeling safe. Every time I do this with a client, we always break down laughing just like Christie and I did here, but it doesn’t even matter if we don’t do it “correctly,” because laughing is also such a helpful way to move our nervous systems out of threat. The name of this skill alone, The Big Three + 1 sounds so silly that it makes me laugh. What bottom up skills do you use when you need to clam your nervous system?

08/18/2026

I once heard Frank Ostaseski, Buddhist teacher and co-founder of the Zen Hospice Project in San Francisco, tell a story of teaching a group in rural Idaho. Ostaseski was teaching about how our natural inclination is to try to get rid of our pain and discomfort, even though we can learn a tremendous amount from training ourselves to turn toward it instead. Upon hearing this, a man in the group unexpectedly blurted out, “It’s like telephone poles!” Ostaseski could not begin to fathom what this meant and asked the man to explain.

The man said he had spent his career laying telephone poles, which it turns out are about 40 feet tall, extremely heavy, and quite unsteady when you first place them in the ground. His very first day on the job, he was training with an old timer who had been laying telephone poles for many years. He told the old timer that if they placed a pole and it started to sway, he was going to run as fast and far as he could in the opposite direction. “Oh, you don’t want to do that,” the old timer responded sagely. He explained that if the pole started to fall, the very safest place to be was to go right up to it and put your hands on it. “It’s the only way you’ll know which way it’s moving.”

Read the rest of my most recent blog post at the link in my bio 💗

08/08/2026

Welcome if you’re new here! I have been loving this trend and wanted a neuroplastic pain version. If you’re seeing this, I would love for you to comment how you found me 💗



polyvagal ⋅ co-regulation ⋅ ventral vagal ⋅ somatic safety ⋅ felt sense ⋅ nervous system reset ⋅ window of tolerance ⋅ embodied calm • self compassion practice ⋅ gentle parenting yourself ⋅ inner attunement ⋅ tender awareness ⋅ radical acceptance ⋅ soft power ⋅ quiet healing

05/11/2026

Invisible Work
Because no one could ever praise me enough,
because I don’t mean these poems only
but the unseen
unbelievable effort it takes to live
the life that goes on between them,
I think all the time about invisible work.
About the young mother on Welfare
I interviewed years ago,
who said, “It’s hard.
You bring him to the park,
run rings around yourself keeping him safe,
cut hot dogs into bite-sized pieces for dinner,
and there’s no one
to say what a good job you’re doing,
how you were patient and loving
for the thousandth time even though you had a headache.
And I, who am used to feeling sorry for myself
because I am lonely,
when all the while,
as the Chippewa poem says, I am being carried
by great winds across the sky,
thought of the invisible work that stitches up the world day and night,
the slow, unglamorous work of healing,
the way worms in the garden
tunnel ceaselessly so the earth can breathe
and bees ransack this world into being,
while owls and poets stalk shadows,
our loneliest labors under the moon.

There are mothers
for everything, and the sea
is a mother too,
whispering and whispering to us
long after we have stopped listening.
I stopped and let myself lean
a moment, against the blue
shoulder of the air. The work
of my heart
is the work of the world’s heart.
There is no other art.



by Alison Luterman

05/05/2026

If you’re a client of mine you definitely have heard me talk about how our brains have an evolutionarily wired bias towards negativity that makes it challenging to feel happy or content. But that’s not the end of the story because these brains of ours are also remarkably plastic. I hope you’ll check out the blog post I wrote about just this along with my three favorite, super accessible practices to help rewire our brains. Link in the comments and please let me know your thoughts!

03/20/2026

The Buddha’s Last Instruction

by Mary Oliver

Original Language English

“Make of yourself a light,”
said the Buddha,
before he died.
I think of this every morning
as the east begins
to tear off its many clouds
of darkness, to send up the first
signal — a white fan
streaked with pink and violet,
even green.
An old man, he lay down
between two sala trees,
and he might have said anything,
knowing it was his final hour.
The light burns upward,
it thickens and settles over the fields.
Around him, the villagers gathered
and stretched forward to listen.
Even before the sun itself
hangs, disattached, in the blue air,
I am touched everywhere
by its ocean of yellow waves.
No doubt he thought of everything
that had happened in his difficult life.
And then I feel the sun itself
as it blazes over the hills,
like a million flowers on fire —
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.
Slowly, beneath the branches,
he raised his head.
He looked into the faces of that frightened crowd.

03/12/2026

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

By Portia Nelson

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost ... I am helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I am in the same place
but, it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in ... it’s a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

03/02/2026

Summons

by Aurora Levins Morales

Last night I dreamed
ten thousand grandmothers
from the twelve hundred corners of the earth
walked out into the gap
one breath deep
between the bullet and the flesh
between the bomb and the family.

They told me we cannot wait for governments.
There are no peacekeepers boarding planes.
There are no leaders who dare to say
every life is precious, so it will have to be us.

They said we will cup our hands around each heart.
We will sing the earth’s song, the song of water,
a song so beautiful that vengeance will turn to weeping,
the mourners will embrace, and grief replace
every impulse toward harm.

Ten thousand is not enough, they said,
so, we have sent this dream, like a flock of doves
into the sleep of the world. Wake up. Put on your shoes.

You who are reading this, I am bringing bandages
and a bag of scented guavas from my trees. I think
I remember the tune. Meet me at the corner.
Let’s

02/17/2026