A poem today from the state of meditation. Cultivating presence through meditation practice is one of the most valuable things which any person who walks a path of service can do. This poem captures the experience of the meditative state well – although the practice of meditation is not really the point – the effect…
Category: transpersonal
Relationships that kill…how to survive
Finding the balance between self sufficiency and inter-dependence is one of the major tasks of competent adulthood. Sophisticated living requires that we know when we need to depend on others, when we need to draw ourselves in to community, and to allow the strengths of others to carry us through in the areas that we…
Rigidity and fracture – be a willow tree…
When structures harden, and crash in to other hard structures, they fracture, fragment, and break. Rocks, tectonic-plated continents, religious systems, political ideas, and of course, hearts. The hardening of our ideological positions holds the danger of rendering us brittle, subject to cracking up down the fault line of our weakness. What might once have been a powerful,…
The Bright Field. A poem for late summer.
In August there can be more time to stop the rush and tumble of our lives, and to bathe in the richness of what is here. Every second taken away from awareness of the eternal present is a second lost. Most of us lose most of our seconds, most of the time. Screwed up in…
Dignity, the antidote to terror.
Dignity, endurance, calm, peacefulness, establishment and maintenance of strong boundaries. Commitment to order, sustaining and preserving balance, exercise of compassion, mercy and care in our dealings with one another. Defence of values of tolerance, defence of the rule of law, defence of the freedom of your heart to flourish and express your knowing fully and…
The Emerald Tablet
The earth reflects heaven and heaven reflects earth, and there is no division between these realms. Everything proceeds from the origin. This knowing is, and is engendered by Light and by loving reflection. It became known through the body and understanding gently emerged there approached with wisdom and love. It will be constant and it will…
Work, leisure, pleasure, and service.
September comes with the ‘back to school’ feeling, the children have their new slightly too big school uniforms (grow in to it, very practical), the house is clean and clear from a summer of sorting, the preserving pan is out for jam, chutney, pickles, summer completion projects. A hive of industry, but it is the…
The Brexit Challenge – take one dragon…
How do we detoxify our anger, purify our passion so that it becomes medicine not poison? The fire element powers our anger, but it is also the bringer of light. The current Brexit situation (the 48/52 split and all its social and political ramifications) has awoken the dragon of anger on all sides. The dynamism of this fire…
Transpersonal Co-creation
Therapeutic work, especially transpersonal therapeutic work can be usefully thought of as participating in three levels of co-creation:- the inner, the between, and the beyond. More specifically, I propose that we can think of transpersonal therapy as finding ways to help the client (and ourselves) explore life in three broad spheres of engagement. The inner, the…
The archetype of containment
Containers are an archetypal structure. They feature an inside, an outside, and something between the two. Material can be held within the container, and some containers are designed to be transformative for that substance (the womb, the stomach, the alchemical flask, the therapy relationship). Leaky containers are useless. This is why we focus so much…
Self Inquiry -avoiding the ‘me’ trap
‘The treasury of the heart is the library of God’ (Ibn Arabi – Kernel of the Kernel) I have just uploaded my 2015 paper on Self Inquiry to the Papers section of this blog. In the paper I explore how self inquiry can be undertaken as a spiritual practice, as a joint enterprise in psychotherapy,…
Yearning for Hidden Treasure
The spiritual bypass is what we call our unwillingness to explore the difficult aspects of our process. There can be a tendency for spiritually minded types (like me, and you if you are reading this blog…) to want to transcend. We love transcendence. The space! The freedom! The brush of angels wings! I am not…
