Tag: stress
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 Behind Recurring Dreams: Why Do Dreams Keep Coming Back?
You are running on an empty street and you know someone is after you, though you can’t quite make out who this person is. Your heart is racing and every nerve in your body is tense with anticipation. You know you are seconds away from someone tapping you on the shoulder. And then you wake…
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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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Work Stress, the Art of Work and Meditation in Action
Meditation in action transforms work stress. We only need to take three deep breaths and notice the subtle difference in how we feel. It doesn’t take much. As we calm down little by little, we can think and feel more clearly about what is important emotionally and rationally. The art of work and the art…
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Growing a Marriage: Deepening the Emotional Conversation, part 2
“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” Rumi In this article we will look at how to work with the negativity that arises within us through conversations with our partner in marriage. In the previous post, part…
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Work Stress and Feeling Overworked
How to deal with stress at work is more complicated than we might think. Usually we “just endure” the stress at work. Endurance is an important quality to develop. However, if that is the only tool in the tool box we could exhaust our body as well as our spirit. This is one…
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Cultural Mania in the Individual
A very large majority of people in the American culture have normalized mania. We are affected by this because we live in the culture. We participate in it, either to fuel or to heal it. “Trump is not a man apart. He is, instead, merely one of us writ large.” Michael D’Antonio who wrote the…
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Holiday Stress
How we interact with Holiday Stress is where the relief happens. How we relate with overwhelming situations, feelings and time constraints is the skill that we are learning. Healthy stress and Unhealthy stress Healthy stress is the challenge we give ourselves to mature and grow in our life. Unhealthy stress makes us sick and depressed.…
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Sex Therapist or Regular Psychotherapist?
When any of our instinctual functions are out of balance, we can look a little deeper to find sources of emotional and physiological disruption. Sexuality is an instinct of human nature, similar to how we eat, how we care for ourselves, and how we sleep at night. It may show itself as a sexual problem…
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Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Generalized anxiety disorder, as defined by the Mayo Clinic http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/generalized-anxiety-disorder/DS00502 is very clear and simple. The symptoms include constant worrying, obsession over small things, and trouble sleeping to mention a few. This disorder is a group of symptoms that can be controlled by the individual, enabling you to reduce or eliminate medication. The treatments I…
