Susan Mary Malone

Anger comes knocking.  We all get stung by its prickly spines now and then.  And ours is justified, no?  I was right, he was wrong, damn it! Funny thing about that emotion too—you can just think of a situation that made you angry and start to feel the heat rising in your body.  Because anger […]

We all know that happiness, peace, joy are all things you find within you.  Right? All the gurus in all the world’s traditions tell us that.  From Jesus saying, “The kingdom of heaven is within you,” to Pharrell’s Grammy Winning “Happiness is the truth,” the message is the same. Heaven is not “out there,” any […]

We hear all the time about the dumbing down of America.  And that started decades ago.  We’ve seen it progress in publishing through the years.  When my first novel, By the Book, was published, the industry geared its books to an eighth-grade reading level. Doesn’t that make your ears fly up. But as time marches […]

Especially early mornings!  Sometimes I just want to sleep in.  Ya know? Even when you’re motivated and filled with purpose, when you know why you’re doing what you’re doing, when you truly believe in it, well, sometimes you just get tired. Enough whining!  This happens a lot when you’ve committed to a path, to a […]

Life is just crazy.  Yes, it is.  We all walk through the insanity thinking that we’re the sane ones.  And then, we realize that well, maybe not . . . Like yours, my life is always filled with running nine ways to Sunday.  My dear friends point this out often.  “If you had any free […]

Billions of them.  About, well, just about everything I set out to do!  I had those negative tapes circling around my head for so long, they think they live there. And anytime I set out on a new endeavor (or an old one I’ve picked back up again), the first thing that comes up is […]

I am really into joy.  I just love it, don’t you?  Even the most crudgemudgian among us—which we all can be at times!—loves to experience joy. Yesterday while driving to the repro vet (sometimes I think all I ever do is go to the vet!) I heard the coolest thing on NPR’s Fresh Air.  Neuroscientist […]

Last night the verdict came in on the man who killed Chris Kyle and Chad Littlefield.  Dubbed The American Sniper Trial after the film about Kyle, this drew to an initial close, if not an end, to the story. We live in a culture fixated on celebrities of all kinds, many being famous for being […]

We think we’re separate beings.  And in part, we are.  We each have a body, that’s true.  And those seem to be quite different ones, unique to ourselves with boundaries of skin protecting our bones, muscles, etc., etc.  So to look at us, we’re distinct and detached. But are we? We breathe oxygen into our […]

Life is sure full of stressors.  From the big to the little and everything in between. Seems no matter what your life’s about, stuff comes calling. And of course, anxiety is so pervasive, we have a test for how stressful our lives are.  The Holmes-Rahe life stress inventory measures what’s happened in our lives and […]

Sometimes I want to Lock the Gate and Turn off the Phone You know how that is?  We think that means running madly from reality.  And in essence, it is.  But the reasons for doing so are sometimes different from what conventional wisdom might say. Often when I’m feeling that way it’s because I’m neck […]

Not happy?  Life got ya down?  Too many troubles and not enough dancing?  Horrors!  Let’s fix it. We all have ways to lighten our mental loads, our own mood boosters and ways to be happy that work for us.  Or maybe in combination. So let’s play.      Literally. Play. A game of cards.  Farmville.  […]