Traditional meditation practices help quiet the noise and clutter of our autonomic and emotional brain and mind and strengthen our prefrontal brain-mind. They help us to transcend and transform those aspects of our being and build a refuge in witnessing stillness. In addition, research is confirming, what practitioners of meditation have suspected for millennia; meditation changes our brain in ways that have a salutary effect upon many dimensions of intelligence and therefore our being in the world with ourselves and one another.

However, as many American Buddhists and Yogis have discovered, there is, certainly in this culture, a powerful tendency towards spiritual bypass. There is a tendency to bypass the intense, powerful, and often uncomfortable, knowings of our reptilian and mammalian brain and mind. This constitutes a kind of flight from the challenge, the richness, and the profound wisdoms of visceral and psychological/emotional dimensions of human experience and reality into states of being that are more detached and offer some respite from but little mastery of the moil of our, often messy humanity. In many Yoga and Buddhist communities, this tendency has, in the past, caused great problems. It has frequently led to various kinds of interpersonal boundary violations and abuses of power. These communities lacked the tools to handle some of the profound psychological disruptions that were inevitable when doing powerful spiritual practices.

Magic and mystery and wisdom permeate every inch of our history!
When we begin to work with our history, and the living and often neglected forms of self that call us to do that work, we will re-discover the particular history of our suffering. We may find terrible unhealed traumas. We may only find the smaller ‘t’ traumas of daily disconnection, disappointment, and persistent patterns of unintended neglect.

We will also discover that our symptoms are brilliantly crafted spirit-creations that are perfectly encoded with the patterns of the history of our strengths and sufferings. Our symptoms are the keepers of the history of love found and lost. They are the keepers of the ongoing life of love that awaits a proper and healing welcome.”

“Every seeking is guided beforehand by what is sought” (Martin Heidegger, 1924).

This means that our longings live in a prior relationship with the object of their longings.

This means that we are, in our seeking, guided by the very thing we are seeking. Pretty cool, huh?!

This means that we need to listen closely and lovingly to that itch that is calling to be scratched. When this itch has access to a loving and open body-mind, it will make use of that body-mind to answer it’s own questions.

All of life wants to become what it has been given to be. This is the inexorable movement of life towards ever greater wholeness.

Yes yes, I know… what about entropy? That too is happening. We are all doomed. Everything that we love, at some level, will break, fall apart, rot, and die. At the same time, there is this other thing. It has been called syntropy. In part, this is a force that draws like things to one another. Call it the power of love, life is drawn to life, to ever greater complexity of creative interconnectedness.

Without getting too far afield, it is important to remember this fact. All life moves towards greater wholeness, complexity/richness of self-expression. Your being and mine want to come into the fullness of what it/they can be. We are healing machines built/created to move towards wholeness!!!

This is a fact. Now go and see how you can honor this fact and live into your wholeness.

This is a simple axiom: Problems are always a pathway to freedom and peace. Turn towards what is not working, what hurts.

It is calling to you. It wants something. Remember that it, like all of life, is imbued with the same primordial Intelligence with which all life is imbued.

When you remember this, and with proper respect, compassion and curiosity, answer the call, that thing that has been troubling you cannot help but unfold itself for you, cannot help but soften and yield its hidden treasures.
This is not hyperbole or metaphor. This is reliable and repeatable spiritual physics. Now go forth and test this out! Discover the reliable magic that is life!

When we are gripped by fear, our brain will tend to betray us. That is, unless, through serious work with one contemplative practice or another, we have become very skillful with the use of our brain-mind, we will tend to react to our fear with control strategies. These strategies may seem to make our world safer in the short run, but CANNOT HELP BUT MAKE OUR LIVES AND THE WORLD MORE UNSAFE IN THE LONG RUN!!!! That is, reactive protective strategies cannot help but create the very situation that we are trying to avoid. The psycho-spiritual physics of this is impeccable and testable. Just look around and you will see. Remember times when you have attempted to manage yourself or the world through proactive or reactive control strategies and examine the results (pause and reflect…). Have you created a situation that you are happy with? Have you created a life situation in which you want to live?
Still, the parts of us that deploy these strategies, they too are flowers in God’s garden. Their intentions are good. In the absence of wise and loving holding or guidance, their methods were stopgap measures that have outlived their usefulness, is all. Love the parts and they will let go of there extreme and mostly counterproductive methods and reveal their hidden treasures.

Though we are drawn towards union, we also wont flee said union. I call this “burning bush time.” We are drawn to the miraculous. How amazing, wondrous, cool. We feel awe. But, as we know, awe is very close to fear. So, as cool as this burning bush is, it might be nicer to fall back into my couch with a trashy novel, or binge on my favorite TV show.

We need to dive deep, experience the transformative and sobering joy of surrender on a regular basis. If we are to shift our identification with the ephemera of this beautiful and challenging material world to spirit, to the unchanging, trustworthy, and nourishing oneness of Being, then we must have regular experiences of resting in God’s arms, or dissolving into the dark-light of fertile Oneness.

Our spirit buddies, sanghas, and therapist/healers, can help create a safe space for regular deep diving.

Safe and supported use of plant medicines, breath-work, drumming and chanting, rigorous contemplative or religious practices all can help us to relax into wholesome surrender and help us regain our trust in LIFE/Spirit/the Tao.

Our first loyalty is to ourselves. When we are truly self-present, only then can we be present to the world.
The world knows when we are self-present. When we are truly self-present the world cannot help but relax and open itself to us.

Learn and master the tools for ever deeper self-presence.
One such tool is Structured Self-Presence© (SSP), a tool that I developed or, developed me. An introduction to this practice can be found on this site. Another tool, building upon SSP is %60-%40. This too is described on this site.

When we are able to answer life’s call with compassionate curiosity, then life, no matter how tangled, recalcitrant, or pain-filled, cannot help but relax and begin to reveal it’s place in the pattern of things. It cannot help but reveal its own divine qualities. These qualities and energies will now be a part of the flux and flow your body-mind, of your life!

We can, none of us, do this alone. Find your community and practice regularly. Sometimes your religious community is also a spiritual community. Within that community, find those who seek a deeper connection with the Source of life and who seek to heal and transform their psychologies. Find your spirit buddies. Sometimes your yoga or meditation sangha is a place to find your fellow seekers. Maybe you need to begin a men’s or woman’s or peoples group. DO IT NOW and support one another in staying on the path.

There are resources online and books written on the subject (I am happy to be a resource) to help create the kind of psycho-spiritual working group that will be a place that fosters yours and the groups growth over the course of your life.