Posts by Beth Anstandig

Mindful eating. Mindful drinking. Mindful working. Mindful napping. Mindful this, and mindful that. Mindful purchasing of mindfulness-branded goods and services. If you’ve been to a grocery store, a mall, a school, the internet, anywhere, in the past year or so, you’ve been pitched mindfulness. Heck, if you’ve read this blog in the past month, you’ve…

I grew up in the Detroit area and you have to look a few generations back to find any rural folks. My uncle Lenny and I are the only members of the extended family with an interest in farm/ranch life and animal husbandry. And it’s always been a bit of a puzzle to me how…

You’re at your desk and the phone rings. The hairs stand up on back of your neck when the number flashes on the phone’s face: it’s your boss’ admin and you do not have anything scheduled with your boss. Now you do. You have an inbox that’s doubled since you started your day an hour…

When I transitioned from my private practice as a therapist to leadership consulting in the corporate sector, I figured the psychic heaviness of my role would lift some. I knew that people’s work lives were ridden with relationship conflicts, extreme stress, boredom, and career confusion. They showed up in my therapy office with work complaints…

I just got off a weekly conference call with members of the Circle Up team. The call often runs well over an hour but, today, we wrapped in 45 minutes. And I’m a little sad.  I miss my team. We tend to digress, rarely have an agenda, joke around a fair amount, and get a…

Relationships are like high contact sports. We bump into each other and sometimes knock each other down. It’s nearly impossible to have a human relationship with any kind of authenticity and not hit points of conflict and upset. You’ll know you’re having a real relationship if you feel hurt at times! It’s a side effect…

Eric Killough shares the down and dirty truth about meditation and how slowing down our thoughts allows us to come face to face with primitive parts of ourselves. Is it our inner sociopath wanting to run our lives or simply the human animal inside of us who would has a bit of important information?  I…

I met Sally when she was a youngster, just a slight filly fresh off the trailer. I had recently purchased my lovely horse, Rosie, and was knee deep in our love affair when Sally arrived at the barn where I rode at that time. Just your average bay mare, brown coat with black mane and…

A good friend of mine has extended to me an open invitation to go hiking and camping with him in Yosemite basically every weekend over the past month. I said no thanks every weekend. Every weekend, I wanted to go. But I never go camping. I believe this about myself: I never go camping. Then,…

A week ago, I hitched my wagon to the Circle Up Wagon Train. Me, a dozen or so strangers, and a months’ long conversation about personal leadership. What could possibly go wrong? Our first assignment, as I understood it, was to identify one trait in our thinking that was keeping us from moving forward into…