As 2018 comes to an end, I’m filled with gratitude as I look back at all the lovely, strange, unexpected, and unusual things I witnessed and experienced this year. I don’t know about you, but for me the first half was rather slow and fuzzy, and then it began gaining momentum to the point where I’m now enjoying writing a…
Year: 2018
How Your Need To Be Right Hurts You
The words of French philosopher and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have become a New Age cliché: We are not humans having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. Unfortunately, what gives us the opportunity to have a human experience is the ego-mind separating us from our divine essence. So what good is it to…
3 Reasons Why Daily Meditation Is Essential
I’ve always perceived life as energy, but in my 20s, while I was on a “personal retreat” of deep introspection in almost complete isolation, it was much easier to observe the fluctuations of energy within and around me, since all the usual distractions of the external world weren’t there. It was just me and my emotional baggage. Since it was…
Why You Need To Stop Hiding From Yourself
I used to feel invisible. For a long time, my interactions with people left me with the sense that they couldn’t actually see me or understand what I was saying. Especially those I cared about. It was hurtful, confusing, and all around frustrating that the people I loved appeared to speak a different language and refused to see me for…
The Spiritual Power of Grieving
Nobody likes to suffer. We all want to hold on to what brings pleasure, if momentarily, while doing whatever we can to skirt around our wounds and uncomfortable feelings. The external world is very fixated on sensory gratification and avoiding the pain that comes from being human—often disregarding the emotional and spiritual price of such disconnection. But life is fluid,…
What Can You Learn From a Squirrel?
I was on retreat a couple weeks ago, in a cabin surrounded by nature, doing my spiritual practices, writing, reading, walking, and often also sitting quietly doing nothing, just taking the silence in. Aside from birds, squirrels tend to be the loudest in this pristine piece of land, continuously chirping and rustling the leaves as they move and run around,…
Kindness and Empathy Pave Your Path To Freedom
Do you believe people are either good or evil? Humanity seems to have been fixated in the perception of good and evil since time immemorial. Most organized religions have reinforced this polarizing view as well, in an attempt to guide or control the masses with their dogmatic (and sometimes terrifying) versions of the truth. But if you perceive Creation as…