Where Am I?
One of the curious questions a teacher or healer may ask you is “Where are you?” Where do you experience yourself as being? This can be a big clue to our stage of development, but …
Category: Ego
Styles of Coping
Power is a very curious thing. Often, we equate it with the masculine. However, in its essential nature, power or Shakti is feminine. She drives nature. She is our life force or prana. She is …
Responsibility Climbs
One thing about the spiritual path is what Ken Wilbur called “growing up.” This refers to maturing as a person. And that includes taking responsibility for our behaviour. This vs the ego blaming others for …
Ways of Knowing
I’ve talked about ways of knowing in several articles. For example, The Seeing Seer, which explores the stages of knowing towards cognitions of reality. Or On Knowing, which explores the difference between conceptual knowing, experimental …
Masks and Roles
Some suggest the personality is entirely shadow-based. However, just like the ego, it has a natural function. But it can have heavy overlays. It’s better to see our personality as a blend of laws of …
Sustaining Circumstances
Recently, I recognized another circumstance in resolving karma. For various reasons, when some karma completes, we may not let it go. Put another way, even though the consequences have completed, there is some aspect that …
Story Follows State
“Story follows State.” This is a term from polyvagal theory. What it means is the state of our nervous system drives our perception and that drives our narratives. In the most obvious example, when we …
The Quality of What We Believe
Being able to distinguish truth from distortion is a key ability that can develop in our teen years when the prefrontal cortex (forebrain) comes online. However, we may lean more on peers or those we …
Working with Emotional Resistance
In this video, Ben Tannahill of Drunken Buddha discusses how and why we learn to resist experiencing emotions and how to adjust for that so we can resolve them. Ben is a somatic therapy practitioner …
Hidden Structures
Fundamentally, consciousness structures who we are and everything we experience. The physical world has been built up in layers. There are 7 primary layers (koshas) in this process. And there are 7 primary chakras (energy …
Our Psychological Birth
Margaret S. Mahler was a psychiatrist who developed the “separation–individuation theory of child development.” This came to be viewed as the psychological birth of the infant, which takes place over time as a child differentiates …
The Paradox of Change
“Part of the paradox of change is that the more we try to change, the more we stay the same. What you resist persists! What you reject, you become! This is a fundamental tenet of …