differentiation

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 worth exploring and redeeming. The same must be true about all the other flesh sacks walking around. We all contain multitudes. Read More

I Am Deeply Christian And Don’t Call Me That

March 25, 2021

Every once in a while, I am employed to help someone “deconstruct their faith.” I consider it a high honor since it helps me fulfill one of my life commitments – to “undo things.” It is #3 on my list I like to call “My Life Plan.” The text in My Life Plan reads this way: “Undo things – like Jesus, defy expectations and convention.” This is also one of the reasons I find myself floating away from what we call Christianity, but then also finding profound truth in the person and teaching of Jesus – he was sort of liberated from anything that resembled religion. He himself was floating away from his own religion (!!!). He was also deconstructing (maybe even destroying) the conventional understanding of faith, but also, at the same time, fulfilling the essential and best parts of it. Read More

Hospitality: Inviting Your Enemies Inside

February 14, 2021

It is difficult to understand people sometimes. Some people rub you the wrong way, but if you sit in the same space with anyone long enough seeking only to understand them, it will be hard to continue holding them in contempt. Of course, it depends on your stance. If you really want to hold them down in contempt, you will find reasons. It’s an orientation of your heart to attempt to understand and love someone you would have otherwise written off and walled off. Read More

The Contempt In Us

January 31, 2021

Search any human heart and you will find contempt. It comes in many forms and is unfortunately as natural to us as breathing and eating. It organizes us. Somewhere along the way (probably in adolescence), we start identifying everything we hate – everything we think we are not and everything we do not want to be. This is probably a necessary process of forming our identity; the problem is too often we get stuck there and believe that is the only way to “be somebody.” Long into our adulthood, we continue to define ourselves by what we hate. Some people die full of contempt, fairly certain they have things figured out and other people don’t. Read More

Organization

March 18, 2015

As relational beings, we are in relationship to everyone and everything around us. That means we get “organized” in a certain way – in our culture, in our family (of course), in our beliefs and in the roles we play with those around us. We don’t even notice how we are organized really until something changes or is taken away. When the thing that organized you is taken out from under you, you may have a feeling of disorientation or even grief. You will soon reorganize yourself, but for the time being, there is usually some protest – even if the thing that was taken from you was the thing that was killing you. Read More

Your Emotional World

May 24, 2013

We should pay attention to our emotions. It is our emotions that are the barometer for where our hearts are and where we are going. These subtle inner shifts in our feeling system are what the Spirit uses to shape us and teach us. It is problematic that we are always trying to dull important emotions and in that way, render the work of the Spirit ineffective. Our pathology springs from our attempts to always dumb down, lock up and forget about the myriad emotions that have been given to us to engage and use. Read More