Posts in Personal
A Poem to Help Your Kids Feel Safe (Their Whole Lives)

This past weekend I held a friend while she cried and shook for 5 hours. It was one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

My friend and I were talking about feeling safe as children. How every child is helpless and therefore needs to feel protected in order to fully develop. How true development, exploration and learning can only happen inside a container of safety.

And then my friend realized that she had never felt safe, seen and cared for. Ever. In her entire life...

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Want To Get More Done? Take a Vacation.

The word recreation means "activity done for enjoyment when not working" but I prefer to think of recreation in another way by deconstructing the word itself: re-creation can be seen as activities that we use to re-create ourselves.  Taken this way, recreation is when we stop the action, taking ourselves apart, throw out the things we no longer need or that are no longer serving us, and put ourselves back together again using only the parts we want to keep.

Without recreation, there's no opportunity for sub-performing thoughts, frameworks, strategies, or relationships to get off the bus, so they just hang-on and continue bringing us down. Recreation is like spring cleaning for our mind, body and soul. Without it, our minds-eye view

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10 Things I Learned From Big Daddy, my Grandfather: Phil of Ottawa

My grandfather Philip J. Pocock passed away last weekend and today my family gathered for the funeral in Ottawa. Phil was known to all the grandkids as Big Daddy, a name coined by me (the eldest grandson) after I called him that at the age of two. He was a powerhouse of a man and a major force in my life, so on the occasion of his passing here's ten things I learned from Big Daddy:

Number 1. The world is a vast and interesting place, meant to be explored, and best experienced with an open mind. Look to be surprised and delighted, and often you will be.

Number 2. Ideas matter, and should be constantly...

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Anatomy of a Sugar Addiction

Yesterday I was jonesing hard for my fix. I hate feeling like that. Today I feel better and more myself. Tomorrow I think I’ll be back to normal. My name is Will Sacks, and I am a sugar addict.  Admitting this to myself has helped me kick the habit. But it's taken 2 years.

Here’s the story of how I got here, and what I’ve learned along the way. A few years ago...

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Remembering Jasmine Pocock

This week my grandmother Jasmine Dorothea Mary Jackson (later Pocock) left this life and entered whatever comes next.  I'm flying back to Ottawa for the funeral this weekend, feeling overwhelmed. Though I only knew her in her 60’s, 70’s and 80’s Jasmine was a major force in my life and in the lives of her 7 children and 10 grand children. From a young age we called her Mummy's Mummy and the name stuck. Here are some memories as I airport-and-plane across the continent:

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