Tag: spiritual
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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Silent Treatment Abuse or Shunning, page 2
As I wrote in the previous post page 1: “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…
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Dreaming into the Darkness, Spiritual and Psychological Use of Dreams
Dreams “wake us up” to something within. They wake us up to a larger capacity for feeling and understanding our life and relationships. Gradually, we learn the language, customs and nature of dreams and dreaming. This is a way of approaching the great mystery of our inner life and how to evolve. “It’s just a…
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Working with Holiday Stress and Holiday Depression: 3 Areas of Focus
Holiday stress and holiday depression can be relieved by focusing on three interrelated areas where stress and depression are manifested. physical/behavioral mental/emotional spirit/soul. A Force of Nature We can begin to understand holiday stress and depression by looking at some circumstances that are out of our control. We need to look at what is…
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New Year’s Resolutions, Will Power and Bad Habits
Who hasn’t had a problem with will power and bad habits. We all get to points in our life where we see that our habits have turned destructive. They started out fun, exciting and very satisfying and then turned to the opposite. The negative effect begins outweighing the positive effect. The negative consequences on our…
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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…
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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? …
