Ninja your Mind

I like my Coffee Bitter, like My Heart

As I step into church on Sunday morning, I clutch my latte mug as though it’s my tie to earth. The lady guarding the door shifts as I approach. Her hand blocks my way. “Sorry but we don’t allow drinks in here. You can stand over there and finish your coffee,” she says sweetly. I am immediately pissed.   I look over at the three people standing nearby with their coffee cups. They are smiling, engrossed in a conversation. It’s way...

Our Thoughts are like Expensive Wine

Once upon a time Rome was the center of the world, parties were lavish and the wine flowed freely from wineskins (a fancy name for the bladders of animals.) During this time there lived a healer who spoke in metaphors. One day he explained to his audience how no one should put new wine into old wineskins but instead into new ones. With use, the wineskins, (the bladders of animals) stretched and wore down, becoming fragile and brittle....

When you think of a Pink Elephant

Elephants make unrealistic pets. Not only are they ginormous, but they eat hundreds of pounds of food per day. They have brains similar to humans in structure and complexity and a highly evolved hippocampus, which is the part of the brain responsible for emotion and linked to memory.    There is the old joke: “Don’t think of a pink elephant.” Of course, you are now picturing a pink elephant. It reminds us that the brain is...

The awesome part of “NO”

N.O. Two little letters. Put together, that tiny word can sharply slice our egos and bruise our feelings. But if we’re planning on being significant in life we’re going to hear “no” a hell of a lot more than we hear “yes.” Nobody likes to hear NO, but if we can understand how to adjust our attitude about the “dreaded no,” it can prove to be a blessing in disguise, something we can shrug off easily with a happy smile.   Zig Ziglar...

Acting as Therapy Part 2

  Last week, I wrote about how acting can bring to the surface the ever persistent “issues” in our real life. Often, once an issue surfaces, we begin to see it in multiple places and the world conspires to lovingly punch us in the face with it until we can see it clearly. Often we have the tendency to say, “Sure, I know that’s an issue, but I’ll put it on the shelf and deal with it later.”...

Acting as Therapy Part 1

Sometimes, during my scene debriefs in acting class, I feel like I’m in therapy. The difference is that the entire class is privy to my session and I am on stage bathed in the beady yellow eyeball seeping from the back of the room.     In my scene “I” have a four-year-old boy who dies when he’s hit by a car in front of my house. In preparation for the scene I thought I had done a pretty good job creating memories of him and...