Author: Joel

It Takes A Long Time To Change

August 19, 2024

What you are experiencing today is just the aggregate of all the days and experiences you have had up until this moment. Your body is a recorder for every experience, no matter how minute, so nothing is lost. You might think you can avoid, neutralize, or forget the ones you are not sure what to do with, but you have assimilated all of them in some way. You are just a container for all the things that have happened and how you have metabolized them. This might make you feel helpless, but nothing ...  Keep reading

The Light Is Diffuse

August 11, 2024

It’s good if you can find one good person you can trust. That is how you build a secure attachment, and it is how you become aware there is good in the world. But I have also been around a lot of people who have not had good attachments – people who have experienced mostly pain in their caregiver relationships, but are able to reach deep down inside themselves and find love and care for themselves and others despite. It is amazing. The world will try to diminish and extinguish the fire ...  Keep reading

Developmental Nodes

May 26, 2024

These things that you feel like are killing you are just here to usher in the next phase of your life. Yes, it will feel like you are going to die or something you hold very dearly is going to slip through your grasp (or both), but those things to which you cling and believe essential to who you are were meant to be released.

You have already reinvented yourself many times before. That is what life is here to do – wrest from your grasp the things that are not yours, and are not who you are – ...  Keep reading

Finding Real Intimacy

March 26, 2024

If you are not truly listening to another and tuning into the reality and depth of their inner experience, you will become abusive. Then the other person is merely an object to you, simply there to meet whatever you express as your needs. They are no longer human – someone you can be discovering and learning to love. That is why knowing self – discovering the universe inside yourself – is so important. Carefully examining your own interiority with grace, you will undoubtedly find things ...  Keep reading

The Whole Goal

March 17, 2024

The whole point is intimacy. When we are doing all of this work turning inward, it is just to know what’s really inside ourselves. The benefit of knowing what is really in there is that you will be able to share your authentic self with someone else – what you really think and feel and are. So all this plumbing the depths is not just navel-gazing narcissism. It takes some time, patience and finely-tuned attention to really find and draw out the nuances of what is in there. And you will find ...  Keep reading

Lean into Darkness

February 4, 2024

And just when you feel like you have reached the blackest, sickest darkness, that is the time to lean in even further. When God feels out of reach, your only move is to become still, keep your ear to the ground and wait. The waiting itself will change you. And the answers are somewhere there in the dark and stillness.

The caterpillar submits to a kind of death and forms itself into a chrysalis by instinct. If it had consciousness, it might know it was going to emerge light enough to fly. If it ...  Keep reading

Your Many Deaths

January 21, 2024

If you do it right, you will suffer many deaths in your lifetime. And if you do it right, each one will bring you closer to your real self. Believe it or not, everything that is happening in your life is working to bring about these little deaths, which will peel back the layers of your false self and allow the truest form of your being to emerge. Really your “false self” is just all the forms of you that existed before this and which must be shed, like a snake repeatedly sloughing off its ...  Keep reading