Hedy’s Blog
What Happens When Your Parent Shows Up?
Watch Tanya and Terry. They are young. They are in love. And they are unaware of the hidden forces that fuel their Power Struggle…
Live Life to its Fullest, Essence to Essence
Watch the story of Mr. Goldberg the Tailor as it is being told in the TED talk I presented at the Tel Aviv TEDx conference in April 2009. At the heart of this story is the fundamental principle that I teach couples: step out of the “survival suit” together and step into a creative, flexible new dance…
Crossing the Bridge When Grief Isolates You—a Conversation with Cherri Forsyth
As soon as there is a big trauma, because we suffer each in our own way and often incompatibly, we suffer incompatibly. We are in our survival dance. Each one of us surviving in the relationship because we don’t know how to welcome each other inside of the depth of these emotions. And so the survival dance intensifies and we feel like maybe we can’t be together.
The Man With a Heart
In our life together, there have been many challenging times. One of the most difficult for me occurred when Yumi and I faced together the adventure of Yumi’s heart attack and quadruple bypass operation. Each time destiny gave us a life and death challenge, we have seized the opportunity to learn to say a bigger YES! to life…
A Time for Creative Incubation
The year is 1942. The place is Nice in the South of France. These words were spoken by my mother. She and my father were in hiding in a cellar with 5 other Jewish people. They found out that the Nazis were coming into Nice. My mother engineered a plan. She would get out of hiding and go see a doctor. She told the doctor the following: “I have come to ask for your help. Could you sign a certificate that my husband is gravely ill, and needs to be transported to a hospital in Cannes. Give us an ambulance, a driver, nurse’s uniforms so that we can escape.”
The doctor was a good man. He listened compassionately. And then he said: “I cannot give you the certificate you are asking for. I signed the Hippocratic Oath and cannot lie about a patient. Your husband isn’t ill.”
And that is when my mother told him: “You are right, My husband isn’t ill. Humanity is ill. Seven people, me included, will die of the illness of humanity.”
The Turtle and the Hail Storm
Couples universally dance a classic “survival dance”. You may identify when you read this fable of the “turtle and the hailstorm.” However, with steady and regular crossing of the bridge, looking into each other’s faces with new eyes, the reactive survival dance dissolves, and makes room for what relational neurobiologist Daniel Siegel calls “the flow of FACES”, a system that is Flexible, Adaptive, Coherent, Energized and Stable…