Author: Velleda C. Ceccoli Ph.D.

ON PASSION: and the feeling of intensity.

Most people think that passion is something that we feel when we fall in love or lust – and while that is true, there is much more to passion. Passion runs the gamut of emotions. Passion adds intensity and a particular kind of alchemy to any feeling that we experience, highlighting its emotional reverberation in […]

ON IMAGINATION – and the power to make things right.

“Logic will get you from A to Z; but imagination will get you everywhere.” ― Albert Einstein     I have always been partial to fairytales and science fiction because they helped me explore lands that I could only dream of, until, as a young child, I realized that I often dreamed of them while […]

ON MINDFULNESS – and minding your p’s and q’s.

Mindfulness is a term that gets used a lot these days, despite the fact that it has been around for centuries. Eastern thought, primarily Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, and meditative disciplines have always had the concept of mindfulness at their core. The idea of mindfulness has entered western ideas through the world of spirituality and […]

ON MAKE-UP, MASKS AND KILLER SMILES.

Recently I posted a blog on the power of laughter and humor. I was writing about the  kind that makes your belly tremble and your chest heave. The kind that moves the neurobiology of your insides and translates into mood shifts on your outside. The REAL kind. Today’s post is about its opposite, what I […]

ON LAUGHTER : And the power of humor.

A good belly laugh can change the mood, tone and connection to an other in an instant. Teasing or joking with someone can invite them into a space to play with something in a different way. I have noticed that in my clinical practice, the ability to tease or joke with my patients about a […]

On Beginning Anew

It is the end of another year and beyond the celebrations and hoopla of the holiday season, it is a time to take stock of our lives, and for many, a time to think of what needs changing. The New Year often brings resolutions, and those resolutions are based on a reckoning with ones desires […]

THE COMPANY OF MEN – And why it is important.

Having written about women, and how important it is for us to have other women in our lives (https://www.drceccoli.com/2010/06/its-a-girl-thing/ ), it is with great pleasure that I once again step outside my world to dive into the other dark continent- the world of men, and how important men are to each other. Men need other men- […]

ON MEN: Shaken and stirred.

  Ah men. That other dark continent that somehow is supposed to be clearer, simpler, more known. To whom? I wonder. Other men? As a woman writing about men, I find myself besieged with stereotyped notions of masculinity and what it means to be a man. Culturally and societally embedded ideas within the folds of […]

ON MASCULINITY: And What It Means To Be A Man.

I have been keen to write about masculinity and men for some time now, and am aware that in doing so I am traversing the great divide of difference between us. As a woman, I cannot avoid these differences, nor would I want to, rather I intend to speak from a position of difference. In […]

The Shadow of the Thing: Remembering the Unthinkable.

Today marks an anniversary which I do not like, yet feel compelled to post on, since it is the “thing” that changed everything I knew up until the day that it happened. It is the one event in my privileged lifetime that reminded me of how fragile our sense of wellbeing, how frail our very […]