Trauma
The Elusive Mystery of Happiness – Part 1
Ever noticed that the more you try to find happiness directly, the more it eludes your grasp? My hunch is that this is because happiness isn’t properly a goal of life. It’s a feeling that happens when you get some other things right. The U.S. Declaration of Independence affirms that the “pursuit of happiness” … Read more
Read MoreWhat Are You Trying to Prove?
What are you trying to prove? Maybe you’ve heard this one directed at you when you did something reckless or annoying. Minus the emotion and directed objectively toward ourselves it can be revealing, even healing. When taken seriously, as a question of self-inquiry, (and not as an attack) it gets at what’s driving our emotional … Read more
Read MoreThe Many Faces of Denial
Most of the time I’ve spent on my healing journey (ongoing) was about breaking through denial. Or more accurately having my ego broken. A working definition of the ego is that it is denial in the form of a personality. We build it so that we don’t have to see and feel things as they … Read more
Read MoreA Good Man Is Hard to Find
Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, plays with the idea of goodness as conventionally understood. A family sets out on a holiday with grandmother in tow. Grandmother, although of good Christian stock, is manipulative and willful. En route, they hear that a murderer named the “Misfit” has escaped from prison, … Read more
Read MoreTrade in the performance of “good” for the practice of true
If you’ve worked with me at all, you’ve probably heard me use this phrase, “Trade in the performance of “good” for the practice of true. “Good” is in quotation marks because “good” behaviour rarely is truly good, meaning it’s not coming from a true place within. As Mark Twain put it, “good in the worst sense … Read more
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