Tag: suffering
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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Mania and the Manic Episode, Symptoms and their Meaning
It is important to define mania in two ways: By defining symptoms. What those symptoms mean for each individual. Many of those suffering with these symptoms only choose medication for treatment and disregard psychotherapy because the underlying suffering seems too painful or impossible to make any sense out of it. This is the reason for…
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Logotherapy, an Approach to Suffering
The principals of Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy came out of his personal experience and observations during his time in German concentration camps during the holocaust. We need to listen to the insights that come out of such unimaginable physical and emotional pain. Wisdom that addresses the helplessness and emptiness that many feel today. Frankl’s principles were…
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The Art of Suffering Emotional Pain
Everyone has emotional pain, some have less, some have more. Emotional pain is something we all share. What we do with it and what it does with us is the art and the work. Therefore, we are able to relate with emotional experiences to benefit our life. We are moving our life toward a conscious…
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The Shadow, page 3
“Curiously, people resist the noble aspects of their shadow more strenuously than they hide the dark sides. To draw the skeletons out of the closet is relatively easy but to own the gold in the shadow is terrifying. It is more disrupting to find out that you have a profound nobility of character than to…
