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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Body Image Issues: How to Live in Our Own Skin
Body image issues are inherent in our culture. Women, as well as men, are healing this problem by waking up to what it is and how it operates insidiously within our culture and within individuals. Body image definition: ‘Body image refers to how people see themselves. Distorted body image (also called negative body image) refers to…
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Emotional Intelligence Coupled with Thinking
We can develop intelligent emotionality or feeling just as we can develop intelligent thinking. Emotions range from the most ecstatic love and appreciation to the most negative and painful. They are as significant to our inner nature as water is to our outer nature. When our inner water/emotion dries up or freezes over, our spirit…
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Work Stress and Feeling Overworked
How to deal with stress at work is more complicated than we might think. Usually we “just endure” the stress at work. Endurance is an important quality to develop. However, if that is the only tool in the tool box we could exhaust our body as well as our spirit. This is one…
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Psychotropic drugs: Chemical and Herbal Medicine for the Mind and Emotions
I need medicine to help with over-whelming emotions and thoughts. How do I decide what is best for me or my children? Some psychotropic drugs are chemical and some are herbal. How do I choose which way to go? The solution comes out of questions that I have heard many people struggle with. For example,…
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Spiritual/Psychological Counseling? Christian Counseling? Buddhist Counseling?
Spiritual/Psychological Counseling? Christian Counseling? Buddhist Counseling? What is the best way to go with psychotherapy? How spiritual meets with psychological in psychotherapy is very important. One may or may not support the other as they are each brought into individual counseling, couples or marriage counseling, and family counseling. Much of this integration depends on the…
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Cultural Mania in the Individual
A very large majority of people in the American culture have normalized mania. We are affected by this because we live in the culture. We participate in it, either to fuel or to heal it. “Trump is not a man apart. He is, instead, merely one of us writ large.” Michael D’Antonio who wrote the…
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“Never Go to Bed Angry”, (Anger as a Doorway)
“Never go to bed angry” was derived from a bible verse: “let not the sun go down upon your wrath” Ephesians 4:26. Ideally, this is a very good suggestion, but what if you cannot do this? When in fact, you stay up most of the night angry and are angry for days. I feel angry…
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Helicopter Parents, Perfect Parents
As parents, we are in a vulnerable situation. How do we raise our children in this modern world? How do we give them what they need so they will be prepared for all the complexities of adult life? (relationships, money, emotions, how to feel and how to think, how to parent, how to…..) What is…
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Relationship Advice My Ego Does Not Want to Hear
In the previous post I said, “The power of a confused ego is underestimated.” This confusion can harm our relationships or serve as a doorway into deeper, richer, more intimate relationships. In that article I was showing how the ego can mistakingly distort our view of other people, spiritual practices or life it- self. This…
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New Year’s Resolutions, Will Power and Bad Habits
Who hasn’t had a problem with will power and bad habits. We all get to points in our life where we see that our habits have turned destructive. They started out fun, exciting and very satisfying and then turned to the opposite. The negative effect begins outweighing the positive effect. The negative consequences on our…
