Alyssa Luboff, PhD

We all go through phases in our lives where we start to feel like everything has no meaning, no flavor anymore. What used to bring us joy no longer moves us. We feel like we’re just going through the motions. And it’s hard to remember our purpose. Perhaps you’re feeling stuck in that burnout right now. Or you can tuck this advice away for next time you catch yourself drifting toward that desolate place. In this post, I am going to explain to you the energetic picture behind b

An old college friend once posted, “I’m from the middle of the country, and my political views are exactly the same—they fall right in the middle.” It was a tense election season, and I, swept up in the rhetoric of one side, could not relate. Didn’t the middle mean that you were only half right? And worse, that you were also half wrong?

If you tell me there is another side, opposite yours, I will believe you. There are so many ways – right and left, up and down, diagonal zig-zag and spiraling across all the sides of this 360-world we live in. It is important to see, to acknowledge all of them. If you tell me that other side is

Fallen, but not shattered… My heart can break, And my spirit can still be whole. Exhausted, but not destroyed… My energy can run out, And my spirit can still be strong. Worried, but not hopeless… My mind can see no exit, And my spirit can still find the way. So, I tell you –

I often hear people diminish their own suffering with phrases like: It’s just first-world problems. I have it so much easier than other people. It’s no big deal. I really have no right to complain. Sometimes we say these things because we’re trying to remind ourselves to be grateful for what we do have. Sometimes it’s because we’re ashamed of our own needs and of our own vulnerability. Sometimes it’s because we’re afraid to let ourselves feel what’s really going on.

People often reach out to me and say, “Alyssa, my life is insane. You just can’t imagine.” And I get it. I actually can imagine. I’ve been there. My life has been – and still is, because we’re always learning and growing – everything but simple or easy. And then there are the people I don’t hear from at all. Sometimes they feel like tearing everything apart and giving up instead of reaching out. Sometimes they feel too confused to know where to start to explain.

Many of us were taught as children to hold in our anger and to hide it. We didn’t feel safe to embrace our emotions or to express our truths. Many of us believed – and still do – that our anger is bad and hurts people. So, we hold it in, often to protect those we love. This strategy becomes a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy. We hold in our anger as long as we can—like a balloon that we’re filling with more and more hot air—until it just can’t possibly hold any more.

There are times when life is really hard, when it feels like everything is falling apart, like things couldn’t possibly get any worse, until they do. How are you supposed to handle that? How are you supposed to even begin to make your way out of a mess like that? Start by asking yourself just this question:

Why can’t we afford another shutdown? The economy, the elections…So we force sick employees back into the workplace and traumatized students back into the schoolhouse…What about the workers whose personal lives fall apart under the stress? What about the drop in the labor force when so many are forced into early retirement? What about the mild cases that lead to permanent disability? What about those already too weak to fight off another round? Why can’t we slow down?

About a decade ago, while surfing the Internet, I stumbled on a page written by someone who suffers from panic disorder. She was offering a course on how to overcome anxiety. I read her descriptions of not being able to leave her apartment with a complete lack of understanding. What was so hard about going up and down the stairs? Why did normal, everyday activities fill her with fear? Was she just failing to control small worries before they got out of hand?

Here’s a variation on a familiar saying: Life is what happens while you’re trying to get your work done. For many of us, balancing the demands of work and relationships feels impossible. These can be relationships with parents, partners, children, friends, and also ourselves. What we need to do to make a living feels at odds with the art of living itself—that is, the art of cultivating healthy connection with ourselves and others.

If you are like me, the very thought of breathwork can leave you gasping for air. No form of mindfulness sounds less relaxing or restoring than being asked to focus on your breath. Your heart starts racing. Your breathing becomes fast and shallow. Or maybe you get a queasy feeling in your stomach. For people who suffer from conditions such as PTSD, anxiety, and chronic pain, the thought of breathwork can bring to mind more panic than peace.

The death of a loved one. The rupture of a relationship. The loss of a job. The failure of a project. The dismantling of a dream. The end of an era. There are many reasons that the heart breaks, that we feel an emptiness in the center of our chests as the world around us seems to cave in. Sometimes, it hits abruptly, out of nowhere, and other times, it crashes down on us only after a long period of foreboding. And yet the anatomy of a broken heart, regardless of the timing or

You may think from the title that this post is about being selfish or taking advantage of people. It’s actually about learning to love more. And it’s not written for sadists or manipulators; it is for caretakers and codependent types. We each have different styles of loving, and with them comes different healing work to do. This work is for those who love so deeply, so selflessly, at times, it seems, that they cannot bear the thought of hurting those they love the most.

I don’t like the word “privilege.” It connotes the idea of something better, something earned; and whiteness is neither. But the phrase #whiteprivilege has proved useful in explaining the differences in daily experience between people who are white and people of color. This is an essay I wrote several years ago under the title, “Why I Don’t Want to Be Colorblind.” Perhaps another title could have been, “Why We Don’t Need to Be Chanting, ‘All Lives Matter’ Right Now.” It’s the

As our world grinds to a halt – Flights canceled, production stopped, commutes erased – Our planet, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, Reverses the flow and begins to breathe. She is healing, shedding, transforming. And this virus, ironically, attacks the human lungs. We gasp for air. What do we do now? Are we doomed? How do we breathe?

My Grandpa Abe almost never set foot in a synagogue, but the one time of the year when he took pride in climbing the steps of the bimah was on Yom Kippur Eve. It was then that he played the mournful melody of the Kol Nidre on his bass for our whole congregation to hear. It was a piece of Judaism that even my grandfather, who spent all of his adult life estranged from the faith, found relatable.

“You’re one of us,” Nelson said. I looked at my friend, equally surprised by the compliment and bewildered by the spin of his words. I had accepted the epithet, “gringa,” long ago; I knew I wasn’t really one of the Afro-descendant or Indigenous Chachi people, the two ancestral groups living in that region of the Ecuadorian rainforest. But I loved them, and I loved the Chocó, that coastal forest wedged between the Andes Mountains and the Pacific Ocean. It broke my heart every

On really hard days, if I’m lucky, the theme song to the children’s show Arthur pops into my head. “Just believe in yourself,” a voice sings, “Well, that’s the place to start…” I smile, feel refreshed, and keep running uphill, ready to face my demons and what felt, just a moment before, like the whole world turned against me. It’s a great message, one I wish I had heard more while I was growing up. Young children are newly building their models of who they are and how the wor

I once read the Tao Te Ching from cover to cover in a single afternoon. Sucked in and mesmerized, I had no words; simply, the truths of the Chinese classic resonated with my soul. This is how it is to flow with the universe. I emerged from my office as if to another world, my head swirling with the poetry of being. Everything felt alive, as if it were speaking to me, as if we were not separate, but deeply interconnected.