Tag: mindfulness
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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Three Meditation Techniques for Therapy
There are hundreds, maybe thousands of meditation techniques, all with roughly the same intention: peacefulness, happiness, calmness, less pain, increased wisdom and compassion, and spiritual connection. There are seated meditations, walking meditations, standing meditations, and sleeping meditations. There are meditations that use the breath, a mantra, an image, a sound, fasting, psychedelic plants, isolation, and…
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Silent Treatment Abuse or Shunning
“Silent Treatment Abuse” is the ancient practice of shunning using modern terminology to describe how it appears in our present relationships. It can be most confusing and frustrating because it feels like there is nothing that can be done about it. Many people have experienced abandonment, helplessness and loss when they have been shunned by…
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Mindfulness and The Order of Interbeing/Tien Hien
Many people long for a spiritual practice that makes sense and is not woo woo or dogmatic. I find that many people have been very disappointed or hurt by conventional religious organizations, but yet want something to put their energy into that has meaning. Generally speaking Buddhism is not a religion but a way of…
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Practicing Mindfulness
The term mindfulness is used in the three major schools of meditation in the East. It is not necessary to go into their perspectives on practicing mindfulness at this time, but a few examples of mindfulness meditation from these three traditions may give you a sense of how to practice mindfulness in everyday situations. The…
