We’re taking this opportunity to do some time alignments. This applies ONLY to the Monday and Friday classes at the River Shores branch. Classes at the Feith Family branch and Moving for Better Balance at Feith and West Washington remain as is.

Old Schedule:

Mondays - Meditation @ 8 am, Mindful Movement @ 8:45 am.

Fridays - Meditation @ 9:30 am, Mindful Movemment @ 10 am.  

New Schedule begins May 11th

Mondays - Meditation @ 8:30 am, Mindful Movement @ 9:15 am

Fridays - Meditation @ 8:30 am, Mindful Movement @ 9:15 am + new Mindful Movement @ 10:15 am 

Classes remain in current locations (Meditation in the Conference Room, Mindful Movement in the SMB Studio

To summarize, Mondays start a little later. Fridays start earlier and match up with Monday times, plus we’re adding a second Mindful Movement session. This new schedule will go live on Monday, May 11th.

Last Wednesday, we got caught in the Wisconsin weather in the midst of a flash flood. There wasn’t a chance to avoid anything. Dark night, dark street, heavy rain. Before we knew it we were in deep. And it was getting deeper, forcing us to abandon the truck and wade to safety. The truck is a total loss of course but the people narrowly avoided disaster.

It was supposed to be a light week. A week off between 12 week sessions of the balance class I teach and my wife out of town at a conference. Well, so much for that.

Brighter days ahead … the high school varisity soccer season is underway and coming off the bench my youngest daughter, a freshman, has already scored twice. So that’s a bright spot.

Our renovation has picked up steam. My next to non-existent photography skills can’t do it justice but our vendor is keeping the world up to date so I’ll share a couple videos from her.

We’ve been married coming up on 30 years .. brought 8 kids into the world and for the first 20+ years of this adventure, we were pretty much head down trying to keep up with life. Around about the time COVID showed up, that shell was showing signs of cracking a bit. In part, we were becoming a least a little bit financially stable. In part, we were starting to thin the herd as kids flew the nest.

The last, say, 36 months have been a joyride to make up for lost time. Some trips with kids, some just us as a couple, but a marked departure from the shell. We’ve visited mountains and oceans, but domestic and those a far away places. I think, other than the scenery of course, it that everywhere you go is home to someone else and it looks quite grand. And that makes me wonder - since we reside in something of a tourist trap town - are we overlooking things in our own proverbial back yard.

Of course we are and it is too easy to discount that as you dine in an open air beach adjacent eatery … or any other plethora of activities you do while you are traveling that you don’t bother to do “at home”.

That said … I think what I love most about our travels is it makes me feel more connected to home. It seems to be native to the human condition that we’re always looking for that greener grass. What I find over and over again though is the people I meet are far more like me and far less as different as we imagine them.

There’s a lesson there.

In today’s world, Clarity, Calm and Breathing have become precious goods. We are driven in our daily lives by the system, responsibilities and consumerism to the point where we have almost completely lost ourselves.

She’s giving a retreat later this year near Barcelona, Spain. I wish I could go but this year is already scheduled beyond capacity. Click Here .....

If nothing else … if your interested in this Tai Chi, Qigong, Mindfulness, etc… Art With Chi is a great resource to check out.

Today, across my YouTube feed, came a podcast that is just too powerful to keep to myself .. so, to my few followers .. please spread the word.

A conversation about grief …. Anderson Cooper interviews Sara Bareilles… while I will admit to a rather short attention span .. I watched this one start to finish and I can’t recommend it enough … see it HERE

Resilience Meditation

Meditation on Hope

We’ve all been there I suppose. Someone you followed/respected/revered/whatever turns out to have a history with which you cannot reconcile your values. It’s been a while but here I sit again. I don’t need to name the name, but rather want to contemplate what to do about it.

I live in the wellness space, these days mostly focused on aging. Easy pick now that I’m firmly into my 60s and it is rather infrequent to have folks much younger than me in my classes. (though .. bravo to those 40 and 50 somethings that are smart enough to know that we need to be paying attention to some things much earlier than we’d thought). Research is plentiful but solid answers and advise somewhat more elusive.

In this space, the knowledge base is evolving and there are a few folks who I’ll admit, I hung on every word of theirs. You’d think by now I’d be smarter. I certainly thought that….

But alas, one of my idols appears to have some questionable skeletons. I’m done. Cancelled everything. Put a very eloquent (and one I didn’t finish) book on the shelf. Not that the information within isn’t quite likely spectacular, but there are spaces where character wins over content. I’ll bite the bullet and seek a new idol.

Lesson learned … maybe. These are strange days.

New walls going up this week to frame out the new bathroom configuration, a second floor laundry, 3 bedrooms and a library.

Upstairs is now opened up … new framing begins tomorrow…..

Upside …. I haven’t gotten a lot of shop time in quite a long time … to pack this up, I’m going to have to handle every single one of these beautiful tools… awwww, shucks…

If you’ve never seen the structure of an old house, well, it’s fascinating. At present, we’re in a bit of a pause in the demolition phases. Letting the dust settle and tweaking design decisions based on discoveries. Good news is there wasn’t really any bad news. The house was built sometime around 1918. It is said we don’t make stuff like we used to and I suppose this is evidence of that. In some ways, we can’t - the materials available now are different. But we’re off to a good start. Sharing a few photos of “the bones” .. enjoy!

I have a shared Google Drive folder which, if you ever tried to share, you know that it creates a crazy long, impossible to type address. So, clever me, I created a TinyURL based shortcut. Great.. but…. lots of things block TinyURLs … so… I’ll add the crazy long urls here as links you can just click in the hopes that nothing blocks SubStack!

I used to be a techie … now that I’m old, I’m busy trying to find ways around the system … so…..

Click one of the links below to access things if you’ve been otherwise blocked (or, well, if this article isn’t for you and you’re just curious … I’m okay with that too…)

The Folder on Google Drive. (links to everything and a lot of downloadable “stuff”)

The Movement Channel on YouTube (mostly for Moving for Better Balance folks)_

The Meditation Channel (not much public there, but working on that…)

May 3rd, 2026 …. one update. One of the resources on the Google Drive link above is a folder containing the actual meditation scripts (60+ and growing. These are all placed in the public domain, but rather than scroll them, I added an index which will be updated weekly

… so here is a link directly to that: Click Here For Index of Meditation Scripts

Turns out the hardest part is the moving out to make it possible. We’ve lived here for over 20 years and while we wouldn’t consider ourselves hoarders, we be hard pressed to convince a visiting stranger otherwise.

We did secure a year long lease on a house not far away. Today, the moving began. We have several months to accomplish this but the amount of “stuff” you can pack away in a fairly large house while you raise a large family is downright scary. I made 7 trips back and forth today and only sorta made a small dent in one corner of one room in the basement. This is gonna be a haul. But this was the plan.

Pictures to come … the moving might be as interesting as the actual renovation. Hoping I’m not too old to pull this off….