Linden Connects

New article, friends! Please share thoughts, comments, feedback, questions, or insights. I'd love to hear them! 🥰

"A deeper and more nuanced understanding of the ways our biology influences our experience, and the ways that we can intentionally create experiences that influence our own (and others!) biology, allows us to step into a place of empowerment. It frees us to enter into a more skillful relationship with our own and others’ behaviors and ways of being in the world that seem baffling, undesirable, or just plain unhelpful.

Rather than banging our heads against the walls of reality with the story that we should be able to think ourselves into acting differently or incentivize others into 'better behavior' (by force or by plea), this lens offers an alternate way of perceiving and understanding the human experience. Without this awareness, we often attempt to effort or will ourselves or others into more convenient or preferable or pleasant states. We stumble around in the fog of our reactivity, taking it all so personally, believing our struggles to be pathological or indicators of some innate moral deficiency."

The Compassion of Neurobiology — Linden Connects The foundation of all of the work that I do (and, it seems, the lens through which I have come to see the world) is an applied understanding of the ways that our human brains and nervous systems operate. Our ability to respond skillfully to life’s challenges, the quality of our relationships with ...

Beloved humans, consider this a personal invitation!

HELLO JOY! Weekend Retreat, April 19-21st in Vernonia, Oregon with me and Heather Burns.

We will laugh and play together, connect to the natural beauty of spring, reflect in deep conversation, practice imprinting delight into our nervous systems, and explore the ways we (and the culture we live in) block ourselves from our joy and the vitality and resilience that it brings. We will eat good food and wander around the forest and dance and laugh so hard we cry and reconnect to the simple beauty of being human together.

If you are feeling like you need an infusion of joy and vitality in your life as you emerge from winter, join us. If you feel like you don't have time or are too busy for such frivolous things, JOIN US. Seriously. You fu***ng need this. We all do.

DM me for questions. I can't wait to play in the forest with you!

Hello Joy! Retreat | Alderroot Joy is a practice we can cultivate and a practice we need to feel more fully human and more fully interconnected. Enjoy a week-end focused on remembering and experiencing joy through embodiment, imagination, play, and earth connection. In a world steeped in complex problems, we all need restorative....

Tenacity. Grit. Determination. Perseverance. Fortitude. Toughness. Invincibility. These are the words offered as synonyms for resilience. Take a moment and sit with the energy of those words in your body, even just reading them. How do you feel? (Seriously: how do you feel?)

I realize why people are tired of hearing the word. It's because we are tired.

All of these words have the energy of enduring, of standing in the face of an oncoming storm and holding one's ground, gritting one's teeth and buckling down and digging deep and efforting into the void, pretending like I am a stone and not a squishy meatsack with feelings and needs. Sometimes this stance is necessary, but it’s damn sure not sustainable.

What if resilience wasn't about efforting into the void? Withstanding and enduring and all that?

The way that I think about resilience, the way that I've come to understand it based on what I know about stress and trauma and the biology of our brilliant nervous systems is that it is less about enduring and more about the ways that we cultivate our capacity to stay engaged with the world and regulated in the face of all of its many challenges. When I facilitated social-emotional learning classes with high schoolers, one of the things that I would tell them is that it's not that the load gets lighter but that our backs get stronger. That is resilience.

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Resilience Isn’t What You Think — Linden Connects Tenacity. Grit. Determination. Perseverance. Fortitude. Toughness. Invincibility. There is a rigidity innate to these words, a hardness that evokes images of armored soldiers and exhausted mountaineers. To me, the message of these words is: work harder, try harder, keep going, do more. There is a ti

Hey, y'all! I've been working over the past few months to clarify (for myself and others!) just what it is that I offer with my work in the world. This has translated into an updated website, yay! Please take a look and let me know what you think, and please reach out if you are curious about working with me.

And if you know others who you think might benefit from my work, please share with them! Most of the organizations and individuals I work with connect with me through word of mouth, and I am deeply grateful for your willingness to pass on the good word. 🩵

Linden Connects creating spaces for human connection and belonging We as humans have a deep and intrinsic need for connection and belonging. We are relational beings and can only experience true fulfillment and well-being when we are held in webs of healthy and nourishing communities. When we are disconnected from....

Y’all, it’s so goddamn hard to be a human right now. I know that this mortal coil situation has always been a hard road, but this moment feels like a particularly tricky one to exist within. And I say this in full and utter recognition of how much privilege and freedom and resources that I (and most of the people who I spend time with) have access to. As Brené Brown says: “piss and moan with perspective.”

That said, I know so many of us feel overwhelmed by the weight of it all right now. Alongside the demands and stressors of our own lives (hello, holiday season!) and the increasingly frenetic pace at which we tend to operate, we continue to be witness to acute collective suffering at scales that our ancient nervous systems are not equipped to handle. As if that wasn’t hard enough, we are longing for real connection while living in one of the loneliest times in human history.

I can lean on various tendencies when I’m feeling overwhelmed with life, but more than anything I have a historical tendency to withdraw and shut down. To numb out with food or retreat into long and ridiculous fantasy novels or to watch dog videos ad nauseam on TikTok. I’ve often envied folks with nervous systems that tend more toward mobilization, even anxiety, under stress, because from the vantage point of hour five on the couch, compulsive list-making or cupboard organizing seems like a morally superior alternative.

Add to this the guilt for not being productive (ugh) or for checking out of the world when so many people don’t have that option. It can get tricky up in this brain, folks. I’m sure some of you can relate.

Whatever your own go-to coping strategies (you don’t even have to tell me what they are), know these three things to be true: 1) you are not alone in these tendencies, 2) your stress response system is doing exactly what it’s designed to do (protect you in the face of perceived threat), and 3) nearly everything from snack food to social media is minutely designed to keep us hooked and coming back for more.

Also, know this: being hard on ourselves for leaning on these tendencies adds salt to the wound, insult to injury. It’s not helpful, y’all. More and more research shows that harsh self-criticism doesn’t actually help us change unwanted behaviors, it just makes us feel worse.

I invite you to consider the possibility that compassion (for ourselves + others) might be the medicine we need right now.

Compassion offers a real, tangible way of engaging with the world that allows us to keep our hearts open to our own and others’ suffering. It motivates us from a place of love rather than fear or guilt, and it provides a resting place to return to when we are overwhelmed in the face of it all. Compassion is a muscle that we can actively strengthen, a practice we can return to, not just an intention that we hold.

Compassion says three things, whether to others or to ourselves:

S**t is hard. (Acknowledging suffering with mindfulness)
You’re not alone. (Recognizing our shared humanity)
How can I help? (Responding with kindness and care)

Compassion is a twin sister to connection. Now more than ever, we as humans long for authentic connection and meaningful engagement with the world. Trying to hold the enormity of these times from the isolated enclaves of our own siloed experiences perpetuates our suffering. It increases the likelihood that we’ll lean on unhealthy strategies and can make the actions that we do take feel less significant.

While seeking my own version of this connection, I reached out to my dear friend Irene Bailey in October to see if we could offer something to support folks in the midst of everything happening in our world right now. “What are people needing?” turned into “what are WE needing?”, and what emerged from that conversation is the six-week course on compassion and joy that we are opening up after the New Year, which you can read more about below. It would be so cool to have you there.

So whatever it is that you are feeling or thinking or needing right now, talk about it with others. Reach out to have an honest and open conversation. Go beneath the surface and ask the people you love, “how are you, really?” and then listen with an open heart.

And if you’re into it, come hang out with us in January and February and dig in to compassion on a deeper level.

S**t is hard. You’re not alone. How can I help?

[Also, if you're not on my email list and you want to be, you can sign up here: http://eepurl.com/h5AbcH]

💖 Compassion as medicine for these times (and other updates!) I hope that you all are experiencing some ease and finding room to breathe in the midst of life’s demands. In my attempt to offer a semi-regular, somewhat predictable (perfect isn’t real!) update of my work and offerings, here I am, struttin’ into your inbox like I own the place. Thanks for in...