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

Typhoon – The Sickness Unto Death

January 6, 2024

Old man in a rocking chair

You wake up, you’ve been living alone

After all these years

Surrounded by these shards of mirrors

And how’d it get so quiet here?

You wonder, “Where did everyone go?”

You tried so hard to make people remember you for something that you were not

And if they so remember you, then something else will certainly get forgot

Life is for the living

I’ve heard tell ...  Keep reading

God Is Outside Church

January 30, 2023

Do not be mistaken: God is not contained within the church – inside its walls or any of the structures the church has put forth to try and capture God’s essence. God may be there at the church building if you carry God there with you inside yourself. Or God may be noticeably (or not so noticeably) absent. God comes and goes as God pleases, so there are many places you might find God.

God is also not contained by any words written about God, or that will or could be written ...  Keep reading

Practicing Presence: Internal Models

January 18, 2023

Meditation helps us access and internalize the good in the universe, letting it expand within us and become a resource we carry around all the time. The way we first learn to do this internalizing of any kind of presence is through our relationships with others. The people around us when we are growing up help us form some initial internal framework of what people and reality are like. We learn others are harsh and scary or that there is great good in the world – maybe both. We then carry around ...  Keep reading

What You Will Find in Meditation

December 13, 2022

You can meditate if you believe in God or if you don’t. Either way, meditation/contemplation is a hopeful practice. We meditate because we believe there is something “out there,” or “in here” (inside us), or “way down at the bottom of everything.” You are attempting to connect with that thing. If you practice meditation on a regular basis, you will find something. For some of us, it helps to imagine that the universe has consciousness and personality. We ...  Keep reading

Meditation – A State of Resonance

November 21, 2022

We spend our lives trying to get into a state of resonance. You might say that everything we do is aimed at getting ourselves into rhythm with the universe. We eat and drink and sleep and do drugs to feel right. We endeavor to control our environment, establish routines, indulge our habits, seek stimulation and connection. That is all meant to regulate and feel in step with existence itself.

There are plenty of things that make us feel out of step – physical pain, broken relationships, interruptions ...  Keep reading