Aurora’s Self-Selected Top 10 Articles

Stories on forgiveness, healing, pit bulls, and saying “yes” to life

Here are my top ten soul-sustaining and enlivening stories brimming with hope and healing. And like a rich balm for the soul, I hope that these articles inspire and bring you peace.

There’s something curiously stimulating about creating from the heart. During my time at Medium, I have found that the articles that seem to garner the best response are the ones that I wrote quickly, with an eye toward authenticity, interconnectedness, and the love that surrounds us all.

I was a news and PR writer for a decade or so and never really enjoyed that writing process until I started to listen to the ephemeral drumbeat of my own heart.

So dear reader, I hope you enjoy these articles as much as I enjoyed writing them for you.

1. The Definitive Guide to Forgiveness

This is one of my all-time favorite articles. It’s one that I wrote a month or so into Medium, straight from the heart, and includes five steps to expand our capacity to forgive.

2. Are You Resisting Your Life?

I wrote this article spur of the moment, one month into COVID-19 isolation. In it, I explored why it’s important to accept whatever life throws at you, in hopes that it would inspire hope and courage during the epidemic.

3. The Essential Art of Releasing Fear

I wrote this to encourage my readers to really look at fear and think about how our actions and thoughts can more easily reflect the truth of who we are.

4. The 3 Most Important Questions to Ask Yourself Every Day

This article combines personal experience with questions to guide us through the dizzying spectrum of life so that we can find gratitude for what is.

5. 10 Timeless Pieces of Wisdom for the Modern World

This article details 10 life-changing lessons that guided me out of the dark night of the soul and into enlightenment. It is really the heart of who I am and I hope that it inspires you to think about your own learnings.

6. 20 Life Lessons Learned From One Hour of Silence

This article chronicled the two years that I spent practicing periods of silence. It was a time of profound growth and enlightenment and I wanted to share the wisdom gleaned from talking less while saying more. There are whispers of Buddhism laced throughout the whole article because that was the religion that I was studying at the time.

7. 8 Books That Will Change Your Life

This article lists eight texts by other authors that changed my life for the better. I wrote it because Yes to Life by Viktor Frankl was released a week prior and I just had to dig in. After I visited my library shelves, the list turned into eight books because I couldn’t choose just one or even a few.

8. I Followed My Rescued Pit Bull Around to Document His Day

This was one of those articles that you think about writing for months but don’t until it’s the right time. I spent eight hours following and observing the behaviors of my newest rescue pit bull, which is a breed that is greatly misinterpreting and villainized by society. My goal was to help demystify Raffi’s breed for potential owners, but it was so much fun to write and it also deepened my bond with him. He has emotionally grown in leaps and bounds since I wrote this article, so now I’m thinking about writing an update.

9. How Complete Immersion in Nature has Healing Power

To be quite honest, I dream of living outside in a tent for the warm months here in Colorado. Like many of us, nature has always been soul-sustaining for me. And in the depths of a snowy season, I wrote this article to remind myself and the reader about the healing power of nature. One day, I plan to camp and hike for months on end, and this was the start of that journey.

10. The Essential Art of Choice

I wrote this article to reflect over the past two decades and to detail how our choices have both great power and great consequences. It’s an essay detailing how we can use our choices to create the life that we want.

And that’s it! Those my top 10 articles, based on personal preference. I hope that you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them for you and that they serve as a poetic instrument for observing and redrawing the spectrum of possibility and promise.

With much love, Aurora