I was a senior at the Barbara Brennan School of Healing (BBSH), panting my way through the final year of this arduous education I had insistently and irrationally pursued. The school was like no other that I - or anyone else I knew before enrolling in it - had ever known. Which was precisely the point, of course: I had intended for that education to change my life.

Read more: Getting It All Done

My client sat before me, shoulders slumped and eyes downcast. She sighed heavily with an air of somber resignation. Just moments before she had been brimming with enthusiasm, her posture erect and her voice alive with possibility. Together we had brainstormed different ways she could explore an idea she had about work – not a practical idea about ways she could improve her current job, but a sparkly idea for an entirely new form of work. Work that might fulfill her sense of purpose and nourish her soul. Work that could nudge her lovingly out of bed in the morning. Work that would allow her to develop her innate talents and creativity. Work that that might even be fun.

Read more: It All Counts

At the risk of being seen as hopelessly clichéd, I decided to write about love for my February column. With the inevitable onslaught of media attention on the commercial ways our culture defines and celebrates love, I felt a certain responsibility to offer a different view, one that doesn’t romanticize romance (lovely as it can be).

I think, for the most part, we’re terribly confused about love. We often equate it with a certain kind of feeling that is reflected through attraction, affection and acts of caring, bravery or even wild abandon. Love has been described as a force that sweeps reason to the side and calls us to do things we might never consider in our seemingly saner moments. And that’s the particular aspect of our cultural beliefs about love that I want to challenge: the belief that love is somehow separate from reason.

Read more: True Love

I turned the music up. Maybe the extra volume would supply me with the Christmas spirit I seemed to be lacking and jumpstart my enthusiasm for putting up decorations. Pausing in a roomful of opened boxes and tattered bags stuffed to the brim with memories, I waited for the music to work its magic. Nothing. I sat down and closed my eyes, giving myself full permission to halt the decorating process and, instead, simply invite my favorite Christmas music to infuse me with its exuberant energy.

Read more: Christmas in an Empty Space