I'm teaching a writing workshop! The Write Your Brain mental health writing workshop starts Sept 19th. It's focused on building writing skills around sharing about mental health topics, and developing a writing practice that's healthy for your brain. 5 weeks of writing exercises covering a range of writing formats, from social media to booksClass of 8 (there are 4 spots still available)Weekly 2hr online group sessionIndividual support from me on each exercise Cost: $300 Get all of the details on the TOOLKIT ...
What is quality treatment for OCD and Anxiety Disorders?
One of the reasons I originally started to share about mental health and recovery skills was because I was fortunate to get effective help, but when I started to join online mental health communities, I would hear people sharing about the help they were getting, and it wasn't at all in line with where the research was it. Patients could be struggling with ineffective care for years while their struggles got worse. They'd get slapped with labels like "treatment resistant" and told they had chronic issues but the simple reality was they weren't actually receiving any support or making the ...
5 Tips for Taking Mental Health Workshops Online
I've been facilitating workshops for years, in mental health and business strategy. Adapting design thinking exercises to mental health has been so effective. It's engaging but it's also incredibly useful for understanding complex challenges we're running into and seeing solutions to get out of them. The thing is, though, traveling for an in-person workshop to do that work is prohibitively expensive for many people. So when I was traveling to Europe for a meditation retreat, I started hunting for a central city that people could conveniently (and cheaply) travel to and stay at for a weekend, ...
Mindful community building at Plum Village
On my adventures exploring meditation retreats around the world this year, I was always looking for an opportunity to visit Plum Village, the Buddhist retreat centre established by Thich Nhat Hanh in the south of France as a place for refugees fleeing the Vietnam war to find peace and recovery. It has grown into a home for so many around the world to connect with the practice of mindfulness. So when they announced a meditation retreat for business leaders, I was on it like a monk on a zafu. A meditation retreat at Plum Village is quite different from the others I've explored this year. For ...
The most terrifying thing…
My post on the newly launched Unsinkable Stories is all about an issue that I now know is quite common when people are making progress on recovery from mental illness, but it's not something anybody had prepared me for when I was interacting with the mental healthcare system. Overcoming this challenge is key to preventing relapse and leaving mental illness in the past, but it might surprise you, because it's precisely the thing we think we're chasing: freedom from anxiety and intrusive thoughts and all of that junk the brain loves to throw up. The thing is, after years of building our lives as ...
New York event: April 18th at Luminary
On April 18th, I'll be at co-working space, Luminary (1204 Broadway), for a discussion on launching and running your business without losing your mind in the process. It is possible to be a healthy entrepreneur! Grab tickets here on Eventbrite I'll be chatting with Vivian Nunez, Forbes writer and founder of TooDamYoung, and Ramona Ortega, CEO and founder of My Money, My Future (Mi Dinero, Mi Futuro). The event is sponsored by Azlo. See you there! ...
LARB Interview: Writing as mental health practice.
I didn't wake up to the fact I was struggling with my mental health until I couldn't write anything. I loved writing and I couldn't do it anymore. Forget anxiety about being poisoned or going back to check the door locks over and over again or being paralyzed by anxiety attacks--here was a real problem! Writing YOU ARE NOT A ROCK was only something I could do because I learned how to take care of my mental health and because I changed so many compulsions that surrounded my writing. The tools in the book wrote the book. There's a very direct connect between how I create and my ...
India Workshops & Vipassana Meditation Retreat
Over the past year, I've been exploring and researching different meditation modalities around the world to deepen my own practice and learn new techniques to share through my work. In January, I headed off to Bodh Gaya, in India's Bihar state. It's where the Buddha sat under the Bodhi Tree. A descendent of the original tree grows behind the Mahabodhi Temple today. I visited Bodh Gaya to circumambulate the Mahabodhi Temple and do a 10 day Vipassana meditation retreat. In terms of difficulty, when people hear about a 10 day meditation retreat, that might initially seem like too much! ...
Toronto Event: Mindfulness Recovery
Update: Awesome panel! Thanks to Myodetox and Studio YYZ for making the space to have these conversations. This was the first panel I've been on where everybody was talking about recovering from mental illness to get back to doing the businesses they're passionate about. It is amazing to see this cultural shift towards recovery. You can struggle with serious mental health issues and learn how to handle them and be the boss (of your brain and your business). I'll be joining up with the Myodetox team, Studio YYZ, and the Blu Matter Project for an event on February 23rd in Toronto. I'll ...
Mental Health Q&A Live from Bangalore with Wysa
While I was in India, I stopped by Bangalore to meet with the Wysa team. They've created my favourite chatbot to provide mental health support to people wherever and whenever they need it. You can check it out here: www.wysa.io I sat down with Jo Aggarwal, co-founder of Wysa, to take some mental health questions from their community. ...
Meetups in Hyderabad and Delhi
Let's get together and work on some skills! I love to meet up with people when I'm traveling and share time together building skills and capacity to do the things that matter to us in life. During these workshops, we'll spend a few hours exploring where we want to go, understanding the challenges that can get in the way, and what supports can help us overcome those challenges and take steps in a direction that we value while having all of the thoughts and feelings! Hyderabad (Begumpet): January 27th, 13:30 - 17:30 Delhi (Hauz Khas): February 2nd, 13:30 - 17:30 Exact locations ...
You’re ready to change things.
A reader sent in this personal story of overcoming compulsions at a difficult time in his life. He's now working on becoming a therapist: I’m 26 years old and I’ve been struggling with my mental health ever since I was just a little kid. In December of 2017 my mother got the bad news that she only had a year to live due to her cancer coming back. My mental health, which was already very bad at the time just went down to another level of bad to the point where I couldn’t sleep, my heart racing all day long for no obvious reason and no appetite or life energy. I felt like a shell of a ...
