Category: Psychology and Relationships
These are very personal questions: What is spiritual to you? When and where do you feel spiritual? How do these spiritual feelings get blocked or expanded?
We can carry these questions throughout our lives. Spiritual practice aims to refine and deepen our understanding of them.
I will focus on three specific spiritual practices: psychological relationships, meditation, and psychedelic plant medicines, including cannabis.
Spiritual practice is about psychological relationships because if our spiritual practice doesn’t improve our relationships with others, what’s the point?
The practice of psychological relationships with others and with one’s inner life is a personal experience with spiritual meaning. This involves experiences of vulnerability, hurt, and confusion that teach us the depth of human love and kindness.
Spiritual practice is not only personal but also universal and objective. We need to look at our minds as they are, our human instincts as they are, and our relationship with the natural world. We are born, go through all the developmental stages, and then die. Life is both precious and painful. We cannot change most of life, but we can learn to connect with it gracefully, little by little.
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Dissociative Identity Disorder: The Story of the Fragmented Self
You might be familiar with dissociative identity disorder (DID) as multiple personality disorder (MPD), which is how people used to call it in the past. No matter the name that it takes, this mental disorder is characterized by an individual having at least two personalities. These personalities are completely different from one another. They come…
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Alcohol Use Disorder and the Path to Curing This Addiction
Alcohol use is quite common in our society and is not typically cause for concern. However, some people may use alcohol in unhealthy ways, leading to alcohol abuse. Alcohol use disorder ranges from mild to severe. Behaviors such as binge drinking and alcoholism are common manifestations of this disorder. This article is not intended to…
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Working with Holiday Stress and Holiday Depression: 3 Areas of Focus
Holiday stress and holiday depression can be relieved by focusing on three interrelated areas where stress and depression are manifested. physical/behavioral mental/emotional spirit/soul. A Force of Nature We can begin to understand holiday stress and depression by looking at some circumstances that are out of our control. We need to look at what is…
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Hypomania and Explaining the Unseen Mental Disorder
Hypomania is a state of elevated mood which differs from a person’s normal mood. Hypomanic mood does not typically impair a person’s ability to function, but can alter a person’s behavior and interactions with others in both positive and negative ways. This article is made to be used as an informational resource, not a diagnostic tool.…
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Oppositional Defiant Disorder – The Forgotten Mental Illness
Nearly every child has moments of defiance. Children and teenagers often test boundaries in order to learn about their world, and resisting authority can be a healthy way to assert independence and to define a child’s sense of self. However, for some children and teenagers, rebellion and irritability can become a pattern rather than an…
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The Difficulties of Living with Paranoid Personality Disorder
Paranoid personality disorder, also known as PPD, is one of several disorders referred to as “Cluster A personality disorders.” Cluster A personality disorders involve odd or illogical thinking. A person with PPD will have paranoia and an extreme mistrust of others, even when there is no reason to be distrustful. This article outlines some of…
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The Five Stages of Grief and How to Cope with Them
We’re all familiar with the famous five stages of grief that people are supposed to go through whenever they experience a significant loss. However, not many people know how this model came to be and what it was originally designed for. Nowadays, even if many people consider this model outdated and limiting, others still identify…
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How to Heal a Broken Heart and Move on With Your Life
We as humans are not immune to heartbreak, even though most of the times we wish we were. The truth is you can’t escape heartbreak, the same way you can’t escape feeling physically ill from time to time. That being said, we should also mention that we have become accustomed to claiming we suffer from…
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Work Stress, the Art of Work and Meditation in Action
Meditation in action transforms work stress. We only need to take three deep breaths and notice the subtle difference in how we feel. It doesn’t take much. As we calm down little by little, we can think and feel more clearly about what is important emotionally and rationally. The art of work and the art…
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Existential Therapy or How to Solve Our Inner Conflict
Existential therapy is a method of therapy that is based on philosophy and that believes that humans struggle with an inner conflict because they are confronted with certain givens of existence that they cannot change. So existential therapy is all about the human condition. It looks to uncover positive aspects of humanity and human abilities,…
