relationships

Breathing/Oscillating

January 11, 2025

All of life is a steady, rhythmed breathing in and out. That process occurs without any thought or intent on your part, and yet, it is the thing that keeps you alive. Your whole life, you oscillate between utter breathlessness and lungs full of air, aching to be pushed out. Life happens because of the movement from one to the other and back.

Our lives are made up of the coming and going between two poles on many dimensions. Everyday, you wake up and move forward with the day’s activities. Then ... 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

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

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

I’ve Stopped Trying To Be Happy

January 27, 2019

I have stopped trying to be happy. For a while, I thought it might be possible to be happy, but now I believe something different. There was a point three years ago when my grandmother died and I realized the rest of my life was going to be a series of losses leading up to my own death. Then my family and I lost a few more people before their time and a series of other unfortunate events ensued. It was the most difficult time of my life (still is), but I have also found a lot of meaning in it. ... Keep reading

The Foundational Spiritual Practice Of Presence

January 20, 2019

Another foundational spiritual practice is presence. Presence is the practice of being here now. This practice is key to the spiritual life and to relationships in general. When we are present, connection happens. It’s very difficult to connect with someone if you are not present in the moment with them – if you are “somewhere else.” Our anxiety wants us to do anything but be in the moment. It wants to take us out of the moment: “What needs to be done?” “What do we need to ... Keep reading

The Balance Between Action And Contemplation

September 18, 2018

Note: Richard Rohr has written much about the balance between action and contemplation, a common spiritual duality we all navigate. In fact, he is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Many of these ideas are informed by his writing.

I have been thinking a lot about the balance between action and contemplation. I first learned of this precarious duality when I was in college (around 18 years ago) and it continues to be a dynamic push and pull in my ... Keep reading

Growth through Connection

October 26, 2017

The only real way to grow is through connection. Sometimes we think we need to pressure, prod, or push growth by telling people what to do or making a plan to which they must adhere. The only real growth in the natural world around us, though, is through cells connecting with one another. There is no real laid out plan for how plants should grow (except maybe their DNA – the plans are encoded within), and there is not someone there demanding they straighten themselves up and reach out further ... Keep reading