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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How to Control Your Emotions in a Relationship
Relationships take a lot of mental and emotional work. When things go well, emotions run high, but when they go poorly, emotions can become negative and erratic. You might end up feeling emotionally drained after a while and even want to throw in the towel. Trying to find that crucial balance between the two polarities…
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Four Tips for Fighting Feelings of Resentment
The easiest way to describe resentful feelings is that start with the resentment definition, which is a feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or anger toward someone else (or something else) that you feel wronged you or caused you hurt. It’s a persistent feeling and isn’t always easy to get over. What is Resentment? Dictionary definitions, no…
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How to Feel Better about Your Body: 8 Things that May Help
Almost everyone has something that they do not like about their body, something that makes them feel insecure. You might look in the mirror and see things that you do not find attractive or feel the urge to change. The truth is, learning how to feel better about your body is not an easy task…
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8 Tips on How to Build Mental Toughness
When we hear the word “toughness”, we tend to make the association with physical strength. However, there is such thing as mental strength, and it can take a good amount of effort to build up such fortitude. If you are looking for tips on how to build mental toughness, the following eight suggestions might be…
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Why Opioid Addiction Should Scare You
There is an epidemic in the United States that is killing people; It’s opioid addiction. The most frightening thing about this crisis is the number of people it is killing. All the statistics you need to understand how terrible this epidemic is are online, but the fact is that opioids killed five times more people…
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What Not to Tell a Therapist: 8 Thoughts to Keep for Yourself
We often think that, when we speak to our therapists, we have to tell them everything. While it can be helpful to tell them about some of the thoughts and feelings that are bothering you, a few of them might actually be better kept to yourself. Also, you are not under any sort of legal,…
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All About the Cycle of Abuse and How to Break It
For decades, psychologists have been talking about the cycle of abuse. While, on the surface, this theory seems pretty straightforward (in that an individual ends up repeating the stages of abuse over and over again), it actually has many complexities. Since you are your own unique individual in your own unique situation, your cycle of…
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How to Be Okay with Yourself
For many of us, the truth is that we are our own worst critics. We only get to live in our own heads and, therefore, tend to overthink and over-analyze things that happen to us and go on within us. That makes it difficult for us to accept ourselves for who we are, especially with…
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Emotional Manipulation and Its Instances in Today’s Politics
Emotional manipulation is an instrument of politics with long-term effects. Political figures use it to determine people to stay idle or act upon something, contrary to their interests. But how can this happen without us realizing it? Well, there are some little cheats that make a speech, ad, or campaign successful. But there are also…
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How to Overcome Abandonment Issues from Childhood
The experiences we face in childhood tend to shape who we are and, therefore, become parts of us that we carry over into adulthood. While many of these experiences mold us in positive ways, there are some issues that can arise during childhood that make adulthood more difficult. One such issue is abandonment. When you…
