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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The Shadow, page 3
“Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting to find out that you have a profound nobility of character than to…
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The Shadow, Page 2
In the previous post, we began looking at the rejected parts of ourselves. The parts that have been put into the “bag” or banished to the “shadow”. Consequently, we may feel like “half a person”, or “something is missing”. As we bring these rejected parts into the light of awareness and value them, we begin…
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The Shadow
“Filling the conscious mind with ideal conceptions is a characteristic of Western theosophy, but not the confrontation with the shadow and the world of darkness. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” C.G. Jung, Collected Works 13: Alchemical Studies. P.335 How to make the “darkness conscious”…
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Save Your Marriage-Friendship, part 2
In the previous post, How to Save Your Marriage, we began looking at basic guidelines for marriage. Save Your Marriage, part 2 goes a little deeper into the conversations that are necessary to untangle common problems. I thought I would give some examples of how that might look. I am not saying that there will…
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How to Save Your Marriage
To have this question, “ How to save your marriage?” means there is deep hurt and confusion in both partners. When I see a couple in therapy, I always assume each person is doing the best they can, given what they have and have not learned about relationships. I also know that almost all problems…
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Fear and Emotional Maturity-page 2
In the previous post we began looking at how the soul wants to live, but can get buried in fear. This fear is based on hurt and cultural conditioning that needs to be felt and reevaluated. To start with, most fear in our culture is very unconscious. It is easily seen in male dominated religions,…
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Fear: The Companion We Hate and Secretly Love
Fear is the part of ourselves we need for basic survival, it protects us from danger. Yes, we are afraid of losing our life, health, relationships, and money, of course. It keeps us on our toes. Yet, it can drive us to lose those exact basics we love so much when it operates without our awareness. It…
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The Roots of Mental Illness
In the previous post: Antidepressants vs Meditation: Healing the Symptom and Root Cause of Unhappiness, we began looking at the roots of mental illness and mental health. As a culture we know the “branches” or symptoms of mental illness very well, anxiety, depression, addictions, obsessions and so forth; but we have difficulty looking at the…
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Antidepressants vs Meditation: Healing the Symptom and Root Cause of Unhappiness
Antidepressants are the third most prescribed drug in the United States. That is a lot of unhappy people. The medicines help, otherwise there would not be such a demand. 60 Minutes ran an episode that showed 70% of antidepressant use is placebo: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7399362n. Whatever works! Now, meditation has been shown to reduce the same symptoms…
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Family Therapist: We are in this together, page one
Family Therapist A family therapist helps with the confusion and hurt as families move through the natural changes in life. The family therapist asks, “What is this problem trying to teach us?” Everyone has something to learn in family therapy, even the therapist. The fluctuations of emotional intimacy and emotional distance are always there, but…
