Blog Archives - Joel Ybarra

Slowing Down Becomes Non-Violence

February 1, 2026

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 ... Keep reading

Your Orientation Matters

December 13, 2025

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 ... Keep reading

Free God

November 29, 2025

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 ... Keep reading

Reaching Out

November 22, 2025

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, ... Keep reading

When In Pain

September 6, 2025

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 ... Keep reading

Liberation

September 1, 2025

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 ... Keep reading

Deconstructing: Your Beliefs Need to Evolve

April 27, 2025

Don’t be afraid to let your faith and beliefs evolve. Everything in us is geared toward figuring out all the “right” things to believe and then defending them and promoting them as what everyone else needs to believe, like they’re perfect in their current form and don’t need any revision or reformation. But the real truth is being uncovered, it is evolving and it is conversation. It’s not that the truth is changing necessarily; it’s that it is still emerging. You’ve just ... Keep reading

Deconstructing is Having A Soft Grip

April 19, 2025

There is nothing wrong with having some working idea of what you believe about the world. Just know you are wrong or, at the very least, not finished learning. Come to some conclusions, but hold those conclusions softly. Soon, you will be presented with information that challenges what you think you “know”. If your grip is too tight on your current assumptions, you will not listen well and you will spend a lot of energy furiously defending the things you think you need to believe.

It is tempting ... Keep reading