Stages or Process
From the Process Model of Awakening post, there have been several related discussion threads. Jerry Freeman and I agree that the Oneness and Emptiness threads are the same thread at different stages or from different …
Category: Psychology
Core Spiritual Practices
In the West, we live in a very mind-oriented culture. A practice like an effortless mantra meditation is excellent for balancing that experience. It uses the mind to go beyond it, into our deeper nature. …
Podcast with Matt on Awakening, Trauma, and Embodiment
Recently, I had a conversation with Matt K., one of the teachers at The Centre for Healing. Unlike prior interviews, we went more into my childhood, then the discovery of meditation, witnessing, and on into …
Cracked Open
In this conversation, Riyaz Motan, Adyashanti, John Prendergast, and Johnathan Gustin explore the awakening journey with serious illness and facing our mortality. Having been through a round of this myself, along with the premature death …
The Highly Sensitive Person, Empaths, & Trauma
In the current time, consciousness is rising. This is increasing access to our hidden trauma (our unresolved experiences) but also means it’s coming up for people who don’t know how to process it. This leads …
Style of Being
I’ve talked before about how the Yoga Sutra describes our tendency to grasp at what we want and to avoid what we don’t. It describes this resisting life as the roots of suffering. This response …
Our Natural Self
What is the Natural Self? First, let’s explore the words. Natural: a state of being relaxed, with no resistance to the present moment. We discover we are the present. Self: our sense of who we …
What is Happiness?
If you ask the average person about happiness, they may describe excitement or thrills. Perhaps they know satisfaction from accomplishment. But this is only a glimmer of happiness. Short, passing experiences. Often, we have a …
On Compassion
We were exploring compassion in a class recently. Like mindfulness, many people have ideas about compassion and what it looks like. But often this is cognitive; compassion as a concept. Many spiritual approaches dismiss the …
Fulfillment
“Integrated is the expression of knowledge, an assembly is significant in unity, united are their minds while full of desires. For you I make use of the integrated expression of knowledge. By virtue of unitedness …
Archetypes
An archetype serves as a prototype for other things. In Jungian psychology, they describe archetypes as patterns in the collective we can draw from. For example, the hero, the maiden, or the wizard. Many personality …
The Power of Attention
There is the old saying: What you put your attention on grows stronger. This may seem abstract or New Age, but it’s a fundamental principle. If we consider that the world arises from and in …