I’ve been in a complex dance with hope over the last couple of years, and I’ve noticed that I have a tendency to expect and plan for the worst. I keep hope very, very close to my heart and certainly don’t engage with it joyfully. This helps me feel safer from a negative outcome. It helps me feel like I’ll avoid the embarrassment of finding out I shouldn’t have hoped. 

Highly sensitive people feel everything deeply. If you’re an HSP, learn how to cleanse and protect your personal energy to avoid overwhelm.

HSP, or highly sensitive person, is a term that refers to people who are a little more attuned to the things many of us don’t normally notice. This is a personality trait, not a mental health diagnosis, well-described and defined in Dr. Elaine N. Aron’s book The Highly Sensitive Person. HSPs feel things deeply, get stressed in overly stimulating environments, and often notice details others don’t. There is an intersection between the HSP trait and the quality of being highly intuitive. Spiritual awareness generally comes along, with an ability to feel things deeply and tap into energies that may not be so obvious on the surface.

April’s full moon invites us to delight in the gifts of being human and to enjoy the coming of spring. Explore the spiritual meaning of April’s Awakening Moon.

Before we followed our current 12-month calendar, cultures all over the world followed lunations, or moon cycles, to track the seasons. Each moon cycle had its own name, usually referring to something that was happening in the natural world at the time.

The Empress tarot card holds rich symbolism and is connected to two important goddesses. Learn what lessons we can glean from this powerfully feminine tarot card.

The Empress tarot card shows a beautiful woman, usually dressed in a flowing garment, covered with pomegranates (a fruit related to sexuality and fertility) with the symbol of Venus on a heart near her feet. She’s often shown in a lush environment, with wheat growing beneath her. Sometimes she is shown as a pregnant woman.

The major themes of the Empress tarot card include fertility, abundance, and feminine power. The Empress is an appropriate symbol for the springtime, when the world begins to come back to life after the dying time of winter. Mythologically, she relates to two other goddesses of the cycle of life and springtime.

Enjoy this gentle meditation to honor Ostara, a spring equinox celebration, and to welcome greater fertility and abundance into your life.

In this brief meditation, we acknowledge Ostara, the traditional celebration of the spring equinox, as a moment when the light and dark are equal and when we transition from the dark half of the year to the bright half. We focus on inviting the energy of fertility (literal or metaphorical), hope, and light while shedding any dark winter energy we are ready to let go of.

Experiencing sinusitis that just won’t go away? Dive into the spiritual meaning of sinus infections to get more insight into how to heal deeply.

Sinus infections can be very painful, often accompanying common colds and allergies. While many of us get colds that easily heal and go away, some cause sinus infections, or sinusitis, which is when the tissues of the sinuses get inflamed and blocked, and are often filled with mucus as well, causing painful headaches, tooth pain, bad breath, and other issues.

Do you know what it’s like to express yourself authentically? Many of us had to give up authenticity for connection, but there are ways to reclaim your emotions today.

Authenticity is a state of being who you really are. It means knowing your internal signals for when something is a “yes” or a “no” and being honest with yourself and other people. It means knowing your needs and boundaries and being able to express them without fear.

Authenticity is a state that requires a baseline of safety. There are plenty of reasons authenticity can be a challenge: social pressure, meeting people for the first time, and the natural fear that we won’t be accepted for who we are. But for many of us, the challenge of authenticity started when we were children.

Ostara is the springtime pagan holiday celebrating equal day and night and the return of the sun. Celebrate with this uplifting springtime ritual.

Ostara is the name for the pagan festival celebrating the vernal equinox (on or around March 20 in the Northern Hemisphere). The name refers to Eostre, a goddess of the dawn, who brings with her the new season of spring and the bright half of the year. The symbols of Ostara reflect those of the Christian Easter (the name of which likely also refers to Eostre) and include eggs and hares. Eggs represent possibility and new life. Hares, which commonly come out to mate around this time of year, represent fertility and abundance.

The spring equinox is a potent time of year for welcoming in new energy and revitalizing your life. Explore the spiritual meaning of Ostara, the pagan celebration of spring.

The spring equinox, also called the vernal equinox, happens around March 20 each year in the Northern Hemisphere. It marks the first day of spring and a shift out of the dark half of the year, promising sunshine and flowers to come. While the celebration of this day itself is likely ancient, Wiccans and pagans in the modern age named it Ostara.

Explore how what we eat and how we feel are connected, and discover new tips for supporting your relationship with food.

When we talk about self-care, we often think of activities like taking a hot bath or going to a yoga class. But self-care truly refers to the most basic aspects of tending to the animals that are our bodies, and one of those aspects is food. There is an intimate relationship between food and mood, and it’s one we often take for granted. The kind of food we eat, how much of it we eat, and when we eat it can greatly affect our resilience, ability to rest, hormonal rhythm, and more.

Follow along with this gentle guided meditation to get to know your inner child better and help them heal.

We know our inner child is present when we feel experience big reactions to relatively small things that are happening in our lives. The inner child often shows up to let us know we're not getting what we need.

Connecting with our inner child can help them get what they need from us and allow us to see our situation clearly. It is also a wonderful way to get to know ourselves better in a gentle and loving way.

The goddess Brigid—widely celebrated on February 1st—and the Star tarot card have much in common. Explore how these two figures represent resilience after collapse.

The Star tarot card is a beautiful, calm, and hopeful image. In the classic Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, the card shows a naked woman kneeling by a body of water, surrounded by lush green rolling hills, with one large star and several smaller stars shining above her. She is typically holding two jugs of water, pouring one onto the ground and the other back into the water.

I was interviewed by Rabbi Rami, my colleague at Spirituality and Health Magazine, on an article I wrote for the print magazine on the concept of decolonizing therapy. It was a very interesting discussion about the model of therapy and how it’s changing in the modern world.

Honor the pagan festival of Imbolc with a simple ritual designed to release the heaviness of winter and invite in the healing fire of springtime.

Imbolc is a traditional Gaelic festival celebrated each year around February 1. It heralds early spring, and while many parts of the world are still very much covered in snow at this time, Imbolc celebrations honor the fire of life returning to the earth after a long winter.

Imbolc is a holiday of hope, a celebration of the goddess Brigid, and the perfect time to honor your inner fire.

The word imbolc roughly translates to “in the belly,” and refers to the time of the year when the sheep had their babies and produced life-giving milk after a long, cold season when the harvest stores were likely thinning.

Use these tips to get through Blue Monday, the most depressing day of year, and emerge from winter spiritually nourished.

Classically, the third Monday of January is known as Blue Monday, the most depressing day of the year. This first month in general can be tough for many reasons. The holidays are over, which means we’re no longer busy celebrating with our friends, and this can bring boredom and loneliness. The holidays can be expensive, and we’re often now feeling the dent in our wallets.

Shame prevents us from feeling and healing on a deeper level. Explore ways to move away from shame in your relationships and personal life.

Shame is a common condition, if a somewhat mysterious one. We relate shame to guilt because shame often arises when we’ve made a mistake or had an experience of rejection. While guilt can be a useful emotion that tells us we’ve done something we’d rather not repeat, shame is a condition in which we feel there is something fundamentally wrong with who we are at our core.

While guilt can teach us something about how we want to be in the world, shame sends us into a sort of painful paralysis; a feeling that we are fundamentally bad and don’t deserve to feel any better.

Are you on a white moon cycle, red moon cycle, pink moon cycle, or purple moon cycle? Learn more about menstruating with the moon.

Have you ever noticed your menstrual cycle syncing up with the moon? The word “menstruation” comes from the Latin and Greek word mene, which means “moon.” It has long been assumed that menstruation has a relationship with the moon, mainly because a moon cycle lasts about the same amount of time as an average menstrual cycle, 29.5 days.

The goddess Akhilandeshvari derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.

But remember Akhilanda’s lesson: even that new whole, that new, colourful, amazing groove that we create is an illusion. It means nothing unless we can keep on breaking apart and putting ourselves together again as many times as we need to.

We are already “never not broken.” We were never a consistent, limited whole. In our brokenness, we are unlimited.

As all these names indicate, there is something cold, hard, and a little scary about January’s full moon time. From the perspective of people who lived off the land, this would have been the time when food stores from the harvest were running out, and the abundance of the spring was still very far away. It would have been easy to go hungry during this time.