Hello Friends, Beauty and the Beast has a place in my heart as one of my most beloved fairy tales. My five-year-old daughter recently went through a phase of fascination with the opening “legend” of the prince’s transformation into a beast, where she asked me to re-tell it over and over again. She could feel […]
Author: Erin Menut
Living Joyfully: Making Now the Best Time
Hello Friends, In A New Earth, Eckhart Tolle describes the difference between inner purpose and outer purpose. Our outer purpose can take many different forms: raising a happy family, pursuing our career, volunteering with organizations whose mission we support, and so on. Our inner purpose is always the same: to awaken to the present moment. […]
Living Joyfully: The Gift of Mistakes
Hi Everyone, Every year I make mistakes. I’m not talking about tripping on your shoelace. I’m talking about the real doozys. One year, when Avenues Yoga had only been open a short time, I brought in a renowned teacher from out of state and fronted his salary, with the expectation that enough students would come […]
Living Joyfully: The Simplicity of “As Is”
Hi Everyone, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” -Rumi In The Gifts of Imperfection, Brene Brown shares a profound discovery from her research: There is only one thing that separates men and women who feel a […]
Living Joyfully: a Step back into Warmth and Kindness
Hi Everyone, I took the kids apple picking at Vermont’s own Chapin Farm yesterday. They had so much fun climbing on the old tractor (with lots of mama help) and picking apples. At one point, my little boy, Aiden, kept cheering, “happy! happy!” as he chased his sister down the grassy lane between the old […]
Living Joyfully: Radical Acceptance and the Tiny Crusader
Hi Everyone, One of the primordial sources of suffering is the feeling of non-acceptance of WHAT IS. The feeling of rejecting what is happening, or what has happened. We all have this part of ourselves that sits back in judgment over the events of our lives. We look back on some events and think, “That […]
Living Joyfully: On Having and Not Having one’s Things
Hi Everyone, As some of you know, I’m in Vermont now with my family, even though I had planned to move to San Diego. In fact, I was so sure I was moving to San Diego that I shipped all of our earthly possessions there in a moving pod. It’s still there. So I only […]
Living Joyfully: Thoughts on Homecoming
Hi Everyone, The kids and I have really been enjoying visiting Grandma and Grandpa in Vermont. In fact, we like it so much we’ve decided to stay. (I knew this would happen.) In the mornings, I’ve been sitting on the front porch, watching the sunrise sparkle the dew on the lawn, sipping my coffee, and […]
Living Joyfully: a Rare & Precious Flowering
Hi Everyone, In A New Earth, author Eckhart Tolle writes about the blossoming of a flower as a kind of “enlightenment -” the plant’s transcendence of it’s ordinary growth and foliage into something rare and precious – and totally different from the plant’s usual, every day being. Tolle explains the “flowering” form of enlightenment as […]
Living Joyfully: Rain & Fear & Curiosity
Hi Everyone, Yesterday I took little Aiden, my one-year-old, on a slow drive to help him get started on his nap. He does not like to take a nap. (He has F.M.O. – Fear of Missing Out.) But if he does not take a nap, then nothing is fun. We call that a catch-22. So […]
