Susan Mary Malone

You know she did.  You probably knew it when she did it.  Or at least, once you became a grown adult and looked back. I think about my mom all the time.  I hear the same from so many of my friends whose moms have left us.  If you’re fortunate, you had the joy of […]

And unfortunately, the lies and shame have often come at the hands of “faith.” Religions from all over the globe trade in both of those.  President Obama recently caught a lot of flak by comparing the modern Isis mindset to the Christian travesty of the Crusades.  And of course while in this politically correct culture […]

And I’m not talking about tolerating the differences in others.  I’m talking about those less-than-optimal conditions in your life.  You know the ones—the, well, this may be less than perfect, may not be exactly what I want, may be a different path than the one I envisioned . . .   But it’s good enough, right?  […]

The rational mind is a great thing.  It helps us to analyze, to dissect, which helps to clear up the road ahead, or piece out a problem in order to deal with it.  In other words, to show us how to take action. It’s the “doing” part of the mind.  The male side in Jungian […]

You know those folks, right?  The ones always in turmoil, always if not actually miserable still teetering on the edge.  They’re everywhere!  And it seems nothing you do or say ever has any impact on their attitudes. Sometimes I think unhappy folks just want to be unhappy.  We know anger causes an adrenaline rush.  And […]

I heard of this for the first time this very year, never having even thought of it!  And while I work with a lot of spiritual tools (those being psychological truth as well), that wasn’t one that had ever crossed my radar screen. While talking one day with the incomparable Evelyn Byrne of White Bird […]

I’m all about being happy.  Because, well, it makes me feel good.  And I like to feel good.  That makes me smile.  And smiling makes me happy.  The cycle of the non-vicious kind! This isn’t unique to me 🙂  A lot of studies have proven that.  In 2012 researchers from Kansas State University showed that the […]

Whatever “this” is. That may seem quite the blanket statement, and in reality, is.  But I’ve seen people tackle the most incredibly obstacles, even in the face of certain failure, and prevail. We all have, no?  How many heroes can you point to?  Of both sexes.  And often they’re not folks who chose to enter […]

We’re inundated with it now.  I blame Pharrell.  He has us all dancing to “Happiness is the Truth!” Okay, so I don’t really blame him.  Sometimes art mirrors life and sometimes, vice versa.  But true art always picks up on the rhythm of human emotions, the good, the bad, and the ugly.  And in this […]

Well, that’s not exactly true! I’m actually a spear chucker almost every day. The psychologist Carl Jung said that while we may be the heroes in our own stories, at the same time we’re also the spear chuckers in someone else’s. Which just means of course that as we pursue our own dreams and goals […]

Of course it was about writing a novel. Mine often are, as, well, that’s what I do!  Just about everything in my life circles back into fiction, one way or another. It doesn’t matter what the journey focuses on, though; any undertaking follows a similar path, with the litany of pitfalls along the way.  You […]

We all get afraid.  That’s just part of being human.  If you feel no fear, you’re deceiving yourself.  Which none of us do, right?  J Of course we all also know the Victor Hugo quote, “Courage is not the absence of fear, but the mastery of it.”  We know that.  But it’s in that mastery […]