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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Dealing with Shame; How it works, page 2.
In the previous post I said, “As people proceed in therapy and in life, they begin to gradually understand this mistaken identity of bad or wrong.” They gradually experience how they became taken in by a false belief of themselves, whether it came down through the parents, school, the church, or any other puritanical point…
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Shame, How it works- overview page 1
Struggling under overwhelming shame is the most common problem I see in my psychotherapy practice. It may not be apparent in the beginning of therapy but eventually it comes around as a foundation of many other painful experiences; such as anxiety, depression, unsatisfying relationships, and addictive tendencies. People realize at some point in therapy that…
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Dealing With Anxiety Attacks: Success vs Failure, page 2
Dealing with anxiety attacks starts with the breath. Just to feel the out breath once, then twice, then three times in a row. Trusting the breath creates stability for insight. Then, the insight helps us learn how to live. As you trust this new stability, you can separate more and more from this anxiety. Momentary…
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Anxiety and panic attacks: Success vs failure
Anxiety and panic attacks are a build up of internal pressure, anxious pressure. The anxiety builds to a point that a trigger event will cause a panic attack. In other words, the pressure that was building unconsciously erupts when an event ignites it, feeling like you are going to die or are having a heart…
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Dealing with Depression: Lost pieces of our soul
Dealing with depression is explained very clearly on WebMD.com, including the levels of severity and types of treatment for depression. If your depression is severe, get help now. However, here I would like to begin to look into what depression means and how to heal it. First, let’s take the word, “dealing”. It seems to…
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Divorce Counseling: Learning new territory
Divorce is a time of change that moves us into new territory within ourselves. The new territory “within” is asking for attention. What we do with the inside will directly effect the outside by the choices we make for the future and our personal quality of being. Outwardly, divorce effects our finances, living space, and relationship…
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Emotional Education: So Easy
Here is a video on emotional education I think everyone should watch, https://vimeo.com/42382486, or upper right corner on my home page. Emotional intelligence is easy, let these children tell you how easy it is. My friend Mark Collin has developed this program for schools here in Northern California and is now becoming national. “Dovetail Learning’s…
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Marriage Quiz: It’s about Friendship
Dr. John Gottman’s “Marriage quiz”, has a 90% accuracy rate of who is going to make it. http://health.discovery.com/centers/loverelationships/quizzes/marriage.html Gottman is one of the leading researchers and therapists in the area of marriage. If we look closely at the questions in his marriage quiz, we find it has to do with friendship, pure and simple. Friendship…
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Symptoms of anxiety: Feelings of powerlessness
One of the symptoms of anxiety described on WebMd: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/anxiety/DS01187/DSECTION=symptoms, describes the feeling of powerlessness. This is an important symptom to study in ourselves, because it points to big healing in the area of anxiety and over-all wellbeing. When we can feel powerlessness, we have already taken a step toward healing anxiety. Powerlessness is deeper…
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Teen Challenges: Communication
Teen Challenges and communication is the topic of this post. As I said in the previous post, the permissive/discipline balance is the most difficult in parenting teen children. It is difficult for parents and it is difficult for teens. Teens need and want to learn about life on their own (permissive) and they also need…
