Inklings Bruce Sanguin's blog

One way of holding your life journey is that it’s a journey into the Heart Self.Ego was built for survival and self-protection.Thank god.Many of us barely survive childhood.Self-protection, through the construction of a false self (yup, the people-pleaser) was intelligent and genius.Good on ya!But in adulthood all this survival instinct gets in the way of … Read more

If you’re familiar with the feeling of “no matter how much I do, it’s never enough,” then this post is for you. Most people-pleasers know it well. There’s always one more thing you could do to make someone happy, to prove yourself, or to earn acceptance. And yet, no matter how many times you push … Read more

Over the years of practicing psychotherapy I have found that there’s a lot of people pleasing going on.  Its forms are legion.  David keeps taking more and more projects on at work because he can’t say no to his boss and is worried about losing his job.  Mary wedded her husband 25 years ago, but … Read more

I’ve written elsewhere about inheriting a negative attitude about desire. I interpreted the opening line of Psalm 23 ( “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” ) to mean I shouldn’t want. Obviously, it means something more along the lines of God provides, chill out. Whether that’s true or not is beside the … Read more

Failures of love, physical or emotional, persist in the psyche. They are disastrous, and in my experience there is no magic way to “get over” them. But they don’t have to run your life either. When we break through the denial that we were devastated by failures of love, it becomes possible to live in … Read more

Thoughts take me out, out of my body, out of now. Molars grind. I am grinding out a problem to occupy this mind. I am this grind. It is a demanding sport, this getting lost in thought. This figuring out of a future that is a replay of a bad season in which all was … Read more

It’s common to hear spiritual seekers berate themselves for “doing” and not “being”. What exactly does this mean though? To most people it means sitting quietly, not having to be busy, and not distracting themselves with activity. Which I get. Compulsively being on the move as a defence against feeling, or dealing with one’s life … Read more

I was born into the world to love it. To love my mother, father, siblings, and the trees, the sky, the rain. When I discovered I couldn’t love my mother because her heart was closed the love transmuted into “fuck you” . It is a revelation to understand the darkness, the heaviness, as what becomes … Read more

The theme of this website and the course I teach, Live Your Own Life, can be misconstrued as a life of selfishness, the exertion of a heroic will to make things go the way mainstream culture has told us will make us happy, (which is always in the direction of increased security, status, and conformity). … Read more

I mentioned in my last blog that I’d been reading Krishnamurti. It’s tricky catching on to what he’s about — well, for me at least. Here’s my best shot, for those interested: His most repeated statement is: the observed is the observer. But what does he mean? What we observe, the world as it is, … Read more