Diane Ingram

I was invited to a friend’s home last week, who recently had a pond with a waterfall installed in her backyard. She said it was there but a few days, when frogs started appearing: first a couple, then eight, then a dozen and now tadpoles! It was such a joy to watch these little creatures [...]

Today I drove my youngest son to school for the last time. At the end of the summer he is off to college.  That’s it—I’m hanging up this portion of parenting—the job of carpooling, coordinating schedules so that everybody gets where they need to be and has a car or ride to get there is [...]

A month ago I had knee surgery—endoscopic, three tiny incisions to trim a torn meniscus. It was really quick and easy with a short recovery. The hardest part for me was that I couldn’t run for a month afterwards.
I have been a runner for 40 years now; two NYC Marathons, a triathlon, several 15ks and [...]

This past week I attended a retreat called “Soul Without Shame: Liberating Yourself from the Judge Within”.  It was a great retreat lead by Byron Brown who has written a book by the same name.
It was empowering to be able to put some space between myself and the judge in my head who harps at [...]

I remember when my son was young and still sleeping in a crib. One night we had put him to bed, only to hear a few minutes later a shriek from his room. We went running in to find he had banged his chin on the side rail from jumping up and down, and put [...]

Two of the qualities that are often missing in our daily lives are stillness and silence. With technology bringing us the world in the palms of our hands, it’s seductive to stay tuned 24/7.  But we weren’t built to digest this level of incoming information either intellectually, emotionally, or psychologically.
And it tends to overwhelm the [...]

Last night, another client talked about having failed or not done something correctly, because she hasn’t attracted yet what she wants. Despite this perspective, she went on to tell me she had a breakthrough in responding to a tough family situation in a new way and felt empowered rather than victimized.
I call that success and [...]

Last week, on the very same road my son had an accident the week before, another teenage boy was tragically killed in a car accident. Shock is expressed all over town—at the bank, the coffee shop, the pharmacy—everywhere I go I hear heart’s heavy with disbelief that another life has ended way too young; and [...]

Our bags were packed, we were ready to go, about to catch a few hours of sleep before we started our journey to Porto Vallarta, Mexico for five days of rest and rejuvenation on my husband’s company’s tab when the phone rang. My son, audibly shaken, describes driving down a dark, country road to drop off his friends when out of the woods pops a deer. He swerved and missed the deer, but lost control of the car. The grace of the event was they were all okay. But the car…not so.

Trying to buy some time, we hoped to postpone our flight by a day—no go. So here we are, processing the disappointment through a few tears and treating ourselves to a stay-cation—low profile, no phone calls, dinners out and many hours reading by the fire.

Snow?!?!
Today, for the second time this season, I got stuck in a pile of snow alongside my uphill driveway as I backed up, again, to try to conquer the ice at the front of our garage—argh! This has been a long winter!
Since my husband was busy with a business call, I called on my younger [...]