Category: Spiritual Practice
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?
Spiritual practice aims to refine and deepen our understanding of these questions because our intent shapes how we perceive spiritual change. We can carry these questions throughout our lives.
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 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 precious and painful. We cannot change most of life, but we can learn to connect with it gracefully.
-
Being Yourself
This is an import passage from Carl Jung about being yourself: “It is no small matter to acknowledge one’s yearning. For this, many need to make a particular effort at honesty. All too many do not want to know where they’re yearning is, because it would seem to them impossible or too distressing. And yet…
-
Stress Management: Healthy Use of Imagination
What do I imagine? Stress Management needs a clear perception of the stress, so we can make better choices for ourselves and others. Imagination is usually not considered. From the previous post on stress: All imagine they should be stronger and smarter: For example, someone said to me, “I have five businesses and I am starting…
-
Cure anxiety
What approach do I need to cure anxiety? Yes, anxiety is very uncomfortable and in fact, it blocks the enjoyment of life. Everyone has some degree of anxiety even though many worry that they are the only ones. To cure anxiety is to personally experience and understand anxiety. We can remedy anxiety but to cure…
-
Dreams and Dreaming, Part one
Dreams are given as messages to balance and guide Dreams and dreaming have a relationship to us, whether we want a relationship or not. They range from the most terrifying to the most profound healing. Everyone dreams and most have a curiosity about them, but cannot understand their message. You may have heard the ancient…
-
Dreams and Dreaming: Balance, Part two
Dreams are trying to balance attitudes that are too dominant, too rigid, too loose or too over used. Dreams are providing a corrective image and experience to our out of balance life situation. Eastern medicine describes illness as being out of balance with nature. In the previous example, the dream of the dog was balancing…
-
Relaxation Techniques
Relaxation techniques reduce negative emotions that build in the body and mind. Negative emotions build up in the mind in obsessive ways, and build up in the body in the form of tension. Have you ever noticed when you are obsessing about something, there is tightness somewhere in the body? The commonplaces are head, shoulders,…
-
Stress Management: Perception, Imagination and Action
Healthy stress and unhealthy stress Over the years I have heard many people describe their stress. The most common theme is feeling overwhelmed. Stress management has to do with: “I can’t do it anymore, I can hardly keep up, I am over loaded, I can’t hold on, he or she is too much for me,…
