Tag: culture
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 Meaning of Group Culture
We are born into a family, a community, a country and the larger group of humans inhabiting the earth. We begin with a given set of groups, each with all of their particular cultural values. The need for kinship is such a powerful force of nature that finding our way with various group cultures can…
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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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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? …
