Tag: Gabor Mate
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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Porn Addiction as Instinctual Confusion
Any addiction; porn addiction, alcohol addiction, gambling addiction, food addiction and so on, by definition has a self- destructive aspect. Gabor Mate writes on addiction: “The aching emptiness is perpetual because the substances, objects or pursuits we hope will soothe it are not what we really need. We don’t know what we need, and so…
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Alternatives, Psychotropic Medication: Psychedelics and Cannabis
In the previous post: Psychotropic drugs: Chemical and Herbal Medicine for the Mind and Emotions, I began to describe how one goes about choosing the different chemical and herbal pathways available to treat anxiety, depression, PTSD, and other forms of mental and emotional suffering. In this post we will look into other alternatives, psychotropic medications…
