As I write my first blog post it seems that everyone is proclaiming that the sky is falling. As a practitioner who set up her first practice in the San Francisco area just as the dot com bubble went “pop”, I know how challenging these proclamations can be on private wellness practices. Suddenly people start treating any wellness modalities that they’ve been utilizing as luxury items; i.e. expendable in a financial crisis. Yikes.

I do have a few bits of good news amid the gloom. First off, “we have nothing to fear but fear itself.” These are the words of FDR in his inaugural speech. For those of us who aren’t American history buffs, he was entering his presidency during the Great Depression; His words are as timely now as they were then. FDR was, I think wisely, calling for a little counter intuitive optimism. He knew that the only way to turn around the dire financial circumstances was to shake people out of their terror. Terror being the thing that fuels these dramatic dips in the first place. If we can treat fear as the shadow it is, rather than as a living and breathing thing, then we can move forward. When stasis or collapse is the only other option, which do you choose?

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