relationships

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

Practicing Presence: Internal Models

January 18, 2023

Meditation helps us access and internalize the good in the universe, letting it expand within us and become a resource we carry around all the time. The way we first learn to do this internalizing of any kind of presence is through our relationships with others. The people around us when we are growing up help us form some initial internal framework of what people and reality are like. We learn others are harsh and scary or that there is great good in the world – maybe both. We then carry around these internal representations and they “help” us interpret all the other things we experience. They also help us form “rules” or “models” we unknowingly consult while interacting with the world. This all happens most of the time underneath our conscious awareness, so these internal models are having an effect all the time without us knowing it. Read More

I’ve Stopped Trying To Be Happy

January 27, 2019

I have stopped trying to be happy. For a while, I thought it might be possible, but now I believe something different. There was a point three years ago when my grandmother died and I realized the rest of my life was going to be a series of losses leading up to my own death. Then my family and I lost a few more people before their time and a series of other unfortunate events ensued. It was the most difficult time of my life (still is), but I have also found a lot of meaning in it. One of the things that has changed is that I no longer believe being happy is the singular goal. I mean I don’t mind being happy and know that I will be happy sometimes without even trying, but I just mean I’ve given up on happiness as the point of life. Read More

The Foundational Spiritual Practice Of Presence

January 20, 2019

Another foundational spiritual practice is presence. Presence is the practice of being here now. This practice is key to the spiritual life and to relationships in general. When we are present, connection happens. It’s very difficult to connect with someone if you are not present in the moment with them – if you are “somewhere else.” Our anxiety wants us to do anything but be in the moment. It wants to take us out of the moment: “What needs to be done?” “What do we need to worry about?” “What’s going to happen next?” We are always on our way somewhere – to something bigger and better, to the next big thing – rather than just being here in this moment. Read More

The Balance Between Action And Contemplation

September 18, 2018

Note: Richard Rohr has written much about the balance between action and contemplation, a common spiritual duality we all navigate. In fact, he is the founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Many of these ideas are informed by his writing.

I have been thinking a lot about the balance between action and contemplation. I first learned of this precarious duality when I was in college (around 18 years ago) and it continues to be a dynamic push and pull in my life. Many of us struggle with contemplation, the practice of focusing inward using the many forms of self-reflection, prayer and meditation. We live in an impulsive and compulsive culture that values action versus reflection, so we are not given to this apparent inaction, but action without contemplation will be impulsive and misguided. Contemplation without action is equally unconstructive, however. Why do honest and deep reflection and then fail to act on the knowledge gained? A healthy life strikes a balance of action and contemplation. Read More

Growth through Connection

October 26, 2017

The only real way to grow is through connection. Sometimes we think we need to pressure, prod, or push growth by telling people what to do or making a plan to which they must adhere. The only real growth in the natural world around us, though, is through cells connecting with one another. There is no real laid out plan for how plants should grow (except maybe their DNA – the plans are encoded within), and there is not someone there demanding they straighten themselves up and reach out further toward the sun. The cells just come together and through some magical interaction, plants grow. Read More

Reconciliation/Repair

May 21, 2017

You will always be in conflict and there will always be a need for reconciliation and repair. The people around you are different than you, and your competing desires produce tension, sometimes agonizingly so. It is not hard to see the world around you is in turmoil. You are probably even in conflict within yourself. Repair, or reconciliation, is what brings all things together. Any beauty we see is the orchestrating of disparate parts into a state of resonance. We must learn to enact this type of reconciliation and practice it routinely. If we do not do it daily, things fragment and fall apart. Read More

Transformative Repentance

May 3, 2017

Living in a perpetual state of repentance is the way to change. We are always in brokenness and there is nothing that keeps our hearts tender like saying we’re sorry, turning around and repenting for the things we have done. It is true you make mistakes every day. Why would you not want to live in repentance? The alternative is to not pay attention to the things you are doing wrong or to rationalize and try to convince yourself and others that the things you have done are not that bad. When you put it that way, it seems like there is only one option. Read More