When the subject of "self-love" comes up, does it make you smile? Or cringe? Shrug? Cower? So many of my clients struggle with self-love because they don't feel worthy. It's disheartening but not surprising — our culture of showy self-aggrandizement does not exactly encourage compassionate self-acceptance.

What do you do when there is dissonance in your life? A lack of inner harmony created by acute or ongoing interpersonal conflict, maybe an unresolved disagreement or dispute, a perceived moral injury, or a personal or large-scale trauma or tragedy?

Internal dissonance is not easy to sit with, and I’ve found there’s a fine line between tolerating discomfort for the sake of processing it and straight up suppressing it. A song by Gillian Welch came on the radio recently, and the chorus struck a chord: “Yeah I wanna do right but not right now.”

My clients naturally bring to me their concerns about people near and dear to them, and I am often asked whether I can work on someone else's energy field without their awareness. Even though the request might come from a place of love and good intentions, unfortunately the answer is no, I need full consent. One result is that I work with a large number of "skeptical spouses" by referral, which I find especially fun and fulfilling. I also teach (and frequently re-learn!) that one of the most healing and impactful things we can do for someone else is to change our perception of them.

As an experiment for today, why not choose to look at a person or situation through a particular lens? At work, school, the supermarket, the subway ... what if you saw everyone as a child?

Lately my family has really enjoyed watching The Dog Whisperer together. We don't own a dog, and yet surprisingly the show's central concept has relevance for us all and particular resonance for my work -- that our energy powerfully impacts our environment and our loved ones, whether or not we're aware of it.

I have always loved the idea that we have inside ourselves everything that we need to survive and thrive. Like Glinda the Good Witch tells Dorothy at the end of the Wizard of Oz, "You've always had the power, my dear, you just had to learn it for yourself." Yet recently I've taken to heart that one of the most important tools we have is the ability to connect with and support and rely on other people, as Dorothy did.