Spiritual/Existential

Generation Possibility | the paralysis of younger generations

December 5, 2011
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I wrote a piece not too long ago entitled “The Lost Generations” that addressed some issues with the younger, more postmodern generations.  I want to write on this topic again using some theoretical concepts from two authors.  Ernest Becker, who wrote The Denial of Death, and Soren Kierkegaard, famous philosopher and writer. The reason for [...]

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Denial of Death

November 21, 2011
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I am currently reading Ernest Becker’s revolutionary book, The Denial of Death.  It has me thinking about many things: my own personal life, the life of my clients and my practice in general, and my future studies.  Becker’s treatment of our denial of death is powerful and hauntingly accurate.  Because we live with the reality [...]

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The Yin and Yang of Explanation and Experience

October 24, 2011
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We all want an explanation for our lives, our behavior, our thoughts, and for how the world works.  We search it out, we think about it, we observe our lives and those of one’s close to us.  We are told it is possible to figure things out if we just think about it long enough.  [...]

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Childbirth & the Reality of Pain

September 12, 2011
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My wife gave birth to our third child this past weekend.  Yes, we are sleep deprived and the other two are acting out in adjustment to such a major change to their world.  She is beautiful and healthy and mom is doing well too.  We are all in recovery/adjustment mode. Minutes after my daughter was [...]

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De-Cluttering the Mind

August 29, 2011
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What makes you feel simple and grounded?  For me, it is the smell of the inside of a certain type of book, or watching my children play.  Sometimes it’s just walking outside.  What helps you get back to the basics.  Yoga and meditation focus on the breath because it is the closest thing to focusing [...]

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Waiting for Direction

August 15, 2011
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Do we ever really know where we’re going?  Many people come to therapy to figure out where they are going.  It seems that some people have a clear direction and go after it, while others struggle to find direction.  I’m sure even the people who have clear direction feel doubts from time to time and [...]

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Four Noble Truths of Addiction

June 13, 2011
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Buddhism is founded upon what Siddhartha Gautama realized were the four noble truths of human existence.  I want to take those four noble truths and apply them specifically to addiction.  I have considered writing an e-book on this very topic, deepening what I am going to write here.  I’m just going to briefly touch on [...]

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Shame and Modern Thought

June 6, 2011
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One could say that a huge reason people seek therapy or struggle in life is due to some aspect of shame. Shame is a sense that something is wrong with us, that we are flawed to the core.  Guilt is about doing something wrong and shame is more about being wrong.   Now, you might say, [...]

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Feeling Stuck

May 16, 2011
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Last week I wrote about change and how we need to take action in order to change.  Sometimes change is also in how we see the world, think about ourselves, treat ourselves mentally and emotionally, and other internal psychological aspects to who we are. Whether we are trying to change something where we can take [...]

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You Have to Change to Change

May 9, 2011
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One of my favorite authors, Irvin Yalom, MD, is a psychotherapist who has written a book entitled Existential Psychotherapy. I’m sure I have mentioned him before.  He has also written a great book (amongst others) on death and death anxiety entitled Staring at the Sun.  In his book on existential psychotherapy, he addresses four major [...]

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Anxiety and Control

May 2, 2011
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Anxiety is a complicated mental, emotional, and physical human experience.  There is not usually one answer or cause to one’s experience of anxiety.  Philosophers and psychologists have been exploring this experience for a while now and anxiety is still mysterious in many ways.  In many other ways we know a lot about anxiety – what [...]

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Who are You?

April 25, 2011
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So often in counselling/psychotherapy/social work and many self-help books, the focus is on “fixing” pathology. The focus is on exploring one’s life to find the problems so that we can fix them. In many theories, the focus is on looking backwards to childhood to find where things went wrong. In psychology and the practice of [...]

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Destroying Old Patterns

April 23, 2011
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In a brief addendum to my last post on Addiction is Good For you, I would like to share a quote from Rollo May (1977) in his book, The Meaning of Anxiety.  This quote in one way helps to illustrate the usefulness of addiction in people’s lives.  The addiction helps to actualize the self and [...]

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Hope

April 12, 2011
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Hope doesn’t seem to be a word we use much anymore – at least I haven’t used it much and I don’t hear others using it. I hear my clients sometimes lacking hope or not being able to find hope, and I myself have recently been on a struggle to find hope. What is hope [...]

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Addiction and Potential

January 18, 2011
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The more I work with the phenomenon of addiction, the more fascinating it becomes as an extremely dynamic coping strategy – dynamic in the sense that it can exist for subtle and unseen reasons, complicated by one’s individual psychology. It is also maddening because it keeps people in a double bind. A definition of double [...]

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The Unseen

December 18, 2010
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I am struck by the impact of the unseen in our lives as human beings. I spend most of my time with clients talking about aspects of themselves or their lives that cannot be pointed to while we talk. Some of those phenomenon occur internally, some in the future, and some in the more spiritual/existential [...]

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You Are Not Your Emotions

November 30, 2010
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One thing the Eastern religions have given us in the West is a perspective that we are not our emotions, that we are the part that can observe our emotions and thoughts. The West has been so consumed with Self Psychology that one can get lost in the internal, psychological world of one’s self if [...]

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Acceptance and Change

November 26, 2010
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Acceptance can be a very powerful approach or mindset to deal with suffering. It is not always about self-acceptance but overall acceptance of the way things are. This is a very Buddhist philosophy but a philosophy for anyone to adopt. The paradox in this philosophy is that once you fully accept your life, your self, [...]

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Space and Place

November 23, 2010
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An area of our lives that does not always get a lot of attention in the realms of psychology and spirituality is that of place. There is a lot of focus on relationships with others and relationship with self – a lot of focus on one’s thoughts and emotions – a lot of focus on [...]

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Coloring Outside the Lines

November 9, 2010
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“Hey, you! Yea, you! Why you trying to be so perfect? Who do you think you are anyway? Do you really think you are going to work so hard that you never let yourself or anyone else down? Do you really think anyone cares if you make a mistake? Do you really think anyone is [...]

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