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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Parenting: Teens
I have seen many teens and their families over the years. Parenting teens begins with a few basic principals that apply in almost all situations. After that, each has their own particular character, such as, too many substances, too much dangerous behavior, absent parents, divorce, adoption, learning disabilities, etc. Teens are beginning a new stage…
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Problems in Marriage: How to Get What You Need
Problems in marriage are an opportunity to get what we need for ourselves and family. As I said in the previous post, change in an individual, marriage or family will happen, it is what we do with the change that makes the difference in satisfaction and getting what we need. And sometimes, we don’t even…
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Marriage Problems: Change is at the Bottom of It
Natures moves toward growth. We can observe growth in plants, animals, humans and more specifically in human relationships. We meet a partner, introduce our partner to our friends, move in together, get married, and then desire to grow our marriage toward more happiness. There is a deep current toward happiness that everyone wants. That is…
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Psychology: as a personal approach to family, culture and the great unknown
Psychology: as a personal approach to family, culture and the great unknown as opposed to meditation looks to the universal. In the previous post I described the relationship between meditation and psychology. Meditation looks into the spirit, universal to all beings. Psychology: as a personal approach to family, culture and the great unknown. Psychology explores…
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Counseling: For Men
Counseling: For Men can start with some guidelines. I taught a couples communication class for quite a few years. I saw how difficult it was for men in the beginning of the class. It appeared as if the women had pulled them in by their hair. Obviously, there was a communication problem, that’s why they…
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Overcoming Anxiety: Spiritual Anxiety (relation to the unknown)
Overcoming anxiety is a very noble quest. I began by describing three ways of looking at anxiety in the previous posts; personal, cultural and spiritual(relation to the unknown). Religions provide an environment to address spiritual anxiety for the culture. They provide rituals, practices and beliefs to address seemingly unanswerable questions. Such as: What’s life? …
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Anxiety: Personal, Cultural, and Spiritual(relation to the unknown)
In the previous post, I began a way of looking at three levels of anxiety: Personal, Cultural, and Spiritual (relation to the unknown). The last post described an example of some personal anxiety, but it is really impossible to separate the three, because one is based on the other, such as a rock is on…
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Parenting: Outer Child and Inner Child; Page 2: The Attitude
Parenting the inner child of the parent, provides empathy and understanding to the outer child. The inner child of the adult is very similar to parenting the outer child, our sons and daughters. For example, we listen to our children for what they need. As we listen carefully to their voice, body language and emotions,…
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Anxiety Treatment: Insight
Anxiety Treatment has two parts, meditation and insight. The previous post, Dealing with Anxiety, covered meditation. Here we will go into the psychological side of anxiety treatment. Meditation reduces symptoms very well, but we also need psychological reflection. Reflection helps us with humility and understanding this complex culture. When anxiety is avoided, it comes out…
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Dealing with Anxiety
Meditation and Insight Dealing with anxiety involves two parts, meditation and then the psychological insight. Meditation provides the strength and openness to experience anxiety and not get taken away by it. The goal of this meditation is not to stop the mind but to return over and over, to the breath and body. Then, insight…
