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The Heart of the Matter: Family Dynamics at Christmas Time
“My experience is that the teachers we need most are the people we are living with right now.” -Byron Katie I sure can’t think of a more potent statement for the holidays and family time. It reminds me of a self-help meeting I was at in my twenties, when a light went on so immediately for me that I saw my whole life differently. Your family, some wise stranger said offhandedly, can push your buttons so well because they’re the ones that programmed them. You know these moments, right? As if basked in breaking daylight, a new and implicit understanding soaked through me. It was the kind of moment…
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Reiki: Let the Beauty We Love Be What We Do
Melissa and I chatted about it and decided this post would be about Reiki and its benefits. I practice Reiki and have for close to fifteen years, after an aunt introduced it to me at the hospital where she worked. Staff were being trained to use it on patients in the oncology unit. At that time in my life I was deeply in need of answers, stress management, a guide, anything! All these years later I now provide Reiki Consulting. I want to tell you all about it, but before I get to that part, it is really important to me to explain why I think Reiki works. …
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Reflections :: Self-contemplation helps you follow-through
Two weeks ago I posted about the “feminine” function of the psyche, what we might easiest call our emotional and intuitive inner life. In depth psychology, we name this the anima. A common wound in our logic-driven society is to thwart the needs of the inner life, to repress ourselves. It is a theme I write often about, how to gently recognize if we are hurting ourself by focusing too much on doing rather than being. Nurturing the inner function is a priority for a healthy individual. It extends to deeper, more authentic relationships, families, communities and so forth. The relationship with yourself is the starting point! To…
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Reflections :: Owning our Emotional Lives
Recently I shared the following quote by Barbara Stevens Sullivan on Facebook: “Our resistance to a feminine orientation is tremendous. We are taught in every setting that we should be in control of our lives and that our lives will proceed in positive directions if we control them properly. We are urged to refuse to give in to depression and despair, to think positively. The consequence of this attitude is not an increasingly widespread incidence of happiness, it is rather a situation in which people feel guilty about their depression and despair, exacerbating their pain by struggling against the legitimate suffering that life involves and that, when submitted to, ultimately…
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Reflections :: Imagination as Practice
Depth psychologists believe and even study something called the imaginal realm. The imaginal realm exists in every one of us. It communicates through symbols. It is an active, healthy part of human relating. Ever get a song stuck in your head, or see an image on your mind screen when someone is telling you a story? Those are symbols, the mouthpiece of the imaginal realm. The imaginal realm is precisely the way our intuition, our inner mysterious nature that infuses us with power and spark, reverence and awe, speaks. Neuroscience calls it right hempisphere brain functioning: intuition, inner guidance, creativity, empathy. I call it Soul. As I continue…
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Reflections :: The Reality of Intuition
Human beings have potentially available a tremendous range of intuitive powers. We are indeed wiser than our intellects. There is much evidence. We are learning how sadly we have neglected the capacities of the non-rational, creative “metaphoric mind”—the right half of our brain. This was Carl Rogers, the originator of the human potential movement, speaking in 1980. His practice of empathy, of meeting people exactly where they are at in an unconditional, non-judgmental way, and his devotion to the principle of each individual having untapped, infinite reserves of inner-potential made him one of the most important psychologists of modern times. How does it serve you to know, too,…
