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…
Tag: emotional freedom
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,…
Do You Often Doubt Yourself Or Lose Your Enthusiasm?
Although we all think life should be easy and fun, and our relationships loving and supportive, life is challenging for everyone, no matter how successful, confident, or wealthy one may be. You are a complex, multilayered soul on a journey of exploration and self-discovery. That is, you’re here to accumulate experiences and then learn from those experiences to transcend the…
The Battle Between Love and Ego
A client once told me she thought her mother was a narcissist because “she loved herself too much.” But narcissism is not self-love, although it’s easy to get confused since the concept was coined after the mythological story of Narcissus, a beautiful hunter who fell in love with his reflection on the water and despaired of not being able to…
Do you Know Where You Belong?
I navigated most of my life feeling like a stranger in a strange land. No matter where I lived or who I was with, I often had the inner sense of not belonging, of not quite fitting anywhere. It was not just the usual self-perception of being ‘wrong’ that this dysfunctional world instills in all of us while growing up;…
