Given a long enough timeline, you can do anything. The work must happen on the inside, which means you must slow down. That is what all this inner work is aimed at doing: giving you control over your internal experience. Meditation, then, is not just an end in itself (trying to rid yourself of thoughts). It is a practice that is fundamental to redeeming everything that has come from outside you and has become your inner experience. Once you ...
Your Orientation Matters
So much of our consternation and anxiety come about because we are oriented against the way life is. When you’re oriented toward always being right, it hurts real bad to be wrong. When you are oriented toward being perfect, you get defensive when it is insinuated you are not. And when you are oriented toward projecting a certain image to the world, you brace yourself against anything less being portrayed. All this fighting against the natural way of things creates anxiety. We spend a lot of ...
Arcade Fire – I Love Her Shadow
Free God
It’s not that I don’t believe in God. It’s that I don’t believe in your God – the one you have made in your image and that seeks to protect and preserve only the people you can tolerate, excluding the people who are not like you and do not believe like you do. God is not who you think God is. And God is not who your religion says God is. If that were so, then God would be small and containable inside your finite brain. God is not who I think God is, either. God is bigger than that.
We ...
Reaching Out
Anytime you reach a paradox, or what appears to be a dead end or an impasse, it is time to reach out for something new. This is a creative process because what you are reaching out for has not been revealed or discovered yet. It is reaching into new space and adding complexity, like cell mitosis. Complexity is what will help us now. There is too much “it has to be this way or that way,” in our discourse, too much blunt application of principles.
If you are going to build something beautiful, ...
When In Pain
When I am in pain, just let me be
I don’t need your pity or outrage or sympathy
I only need Presence
Just give me your eyes
You lived out your story, now this one’s for me
Let me be wrenched
Let me feel it myself
Let me pass through it fully
Or, rather, let it pass through me
I earned it wholeheartedly, now let it consume me
Too many people have tried to explain it
They give it a name
They give antecedents
But pain has been pure since the beginning
It’s the thing that melts wings and it’s ...
Liberation
The point of religious practice or a belief system is to set you free. If it is not doing that, it has become a hindrance to you that you should examine and maybe abandon. Remember, whatever your practice – Yoga, prayer, being part of a church, or reading sacred Scripture – was there originally to lead you to God and to liberation. Any time your practice becomes an end in itself, it fails to fully achieve its purpose, which is to set you free, even from itself. If that happens, you should ...
Mimicking Birds – Bloodlines
I will protect your shadow even though when it’s dark it slips
I’ll clean your window, make you look out and see scenery
I am a stranger, shouldn’t talk to myself in times of rearrangement or even in good mental health
And on the other side soon they’ll side with their family who hides from all the evil within their own bloodline
But you fly a different kite hovering over their heads so high
I will tie your lasso, can’t you make a knot slip?
I’ll ask your ghost if ...






