Tag: suicide
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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Suicidal Ideation and Ego Death
Suicidal ideations are ideas, ideas about killing oneself that are mixed with overwhelming emotional pain. I have talked with many people over the years concerning suicide and found it was an opportunity to examine the unexamined. In our conversations we looked at where these ideas were coming from and how they were mixed up with…
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Fear of Abandonment
Everyone has some degree of fear of abandonment, some more, some less. It comes from our instinct for attachment. We need each other. It starts at birth, when we are one hundred percent dependent on another for physical and emotional survival. This attachment becomes the foundation for growth.  Gradually, from this dependence, a…
