This was an article published in Elephant journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server.  

Extending loving kindness to ourselves creates a fierce fire. As we open to our shadow aspects, the broken, wounded and inferior parts, we may experience shame and feel diminished.  Yet, it is precisely these forgotten aspects of ourselves that cry out for our love so that we can be healed and whole.
                     
When various spiritual traditions and psychological schools offer descriptions of personal transformation, most of us wish to go from here to there, to go from our present condition to that place where we will be a transformed person.  On the Buddhist path, however, we are trained how to go from here to here, not from here to there. 

When we flee from here to there, we're avoiding the parts of ourselves that are distasteful.  In order to get there, to that new and improved 'me', we tend to deny or reject the parts of us of which we are ashamed: the part of us that feels like a failure, that feels defeated or broken, or the part of us that feels unlovable. We’re too quick to move away from where we are presently stuck or hurt.      

The Buddhist path of meditation begins by opening and allowing space to be exactly where we are, how we are, and who we are.  We can finally catch up with ourselves. Meditation tunes us into neutral psychological space so that we can be naked before ourselves. That is the essence of meditation practice altogether.  We can light incense and candles, hang holy images in our room as part of the ritual, but personal transparency is the main point.  We are allowing an opening without speeding towards the next thing to do, so that our body, mind and heart can unfurl and reveal themselves.  If we are too ambitious, too goal oriented, we miss the broken, hurt, wounded parts of us, which need our solicitation and care. 
      
Every time we avoid, deny, or dissociate from the parts of ourselves that feel distasteful or threatening, we’re abandoning ourselves.  It's as if we had a temperamental child whom we’ve neglected for a long time, preferring to give her a project with which to busy herself.  The child is in a room at the far end of the house, and is crying out for our attention, but we don’t have time to be inconvenienced by her needs. We're so busy with the compelling stuff of everyday life that we don’t want to break our stride.    

At some point we actually have to walk up to the child, which is our own tender child-like self, open our arms and caress her,  so that she could feel safe enough to find her own voice and speak her truth. Our stuck places, our depressions, anxieties and unfulfilled longings are symptoms of neglecting our own hurt places. We tend not to listen deeply and sensitively to the parts of ourselves of which we are ashamed, the parts of ourselves that we feel shouldn't be there.    

The practice of maitri is indispensable medicine on the Buddhist path. It is the practice of feeling-attention to our experiences. This is not a light and lovey kind of thing, but a fierce fire.  Learning to love ourselves is the hardest work we may ever do because of our ruthless self- judgments and our lack of forgiveness for being less than perfect.  But there is a way to do this.    

Randomly, at different times during the day, you might just pause for a minute and just allow space. This could be coordinated with a deep inhalation and exhalation, which doesn’t have to be observable to anyone. You just get off the internal 'merry-go-round' and punctuate your immediate situation with a brief pause.  Check in with yourself by bringing your attention to your heart or your belly.  Tune in to your immediate situation with sensitivity and tenderness, as if asking, “How’s it going?” There's no need for analysis, or any kind of heavy handed interpretation. Just an immediate ‘hit’ or reading guided by the question, ''What am I feeling?” or “How am I doing, really?''    
 
We get a sense of whether we're feeling contracted and uptight, or coiled like a spring, whether we are feeling numb and shut down, or perhaps experiencing a delightful fullness. We don't have to fix anything. Like compassionate mothers we begin maitri practice by extending loving kindness to the immediate feeling of pleasure or pain, boredom or loneliness, craving or animosity. 
 
It seems obvious why our suffering would require loving kindness, but why would pleasure need maitri? Usually, when we experience pleasurable states of mind we want to hold onto them and prolong that good feeling.  Or we want to ‘stoke the fire’ to enhance or amplify pleasure, or we strategize how to insure more pleasurable occasions in the future.  In subtle ways, we are manipulating our experience of pleasure.  Extending maitri is a gesture of acceptance and appreciation for the immediate experience of delight, openness and relaxation without any effort to prolong or reinforce it.   

In the practice of loving kindness, first we allow space in order to experience whatever is arising.  Secondly, we cut the reflex to judge either ourselves or the present situation, and lastly we don't manipulate our experience by trying to do something with it. We allow it to be as it is. By allowing space we permit our feelings to speak to us.  We might hear or recognize something remarkably different than what we suspected.  What starts off as a feeling of well-being may change, as we discover a pleasant facade camouflaging our underlying inertia or sadness. We might recognize that we have disguised a sharp edge into a dull pleasant space because we're afraid to lean into a challenge.   
 
What we thought was boredom or claustrophobia may reveal our intolerance to relaxation or our hunger for stimulation.  As we lean into the boredom, sadness or fear, we may discover a sense of energetic presence, an open animated quality that doesn’t present a problem. In meditation practice, when we experience feelings of anxiety or depression we might discover that the story that we tell ourselves about anxiety, sadness or depression may be the larger part of our pain.  
   
We operate according to a perverse logic. Somehow, we feel that if we extend loving kindness to the “rotten” parts of us, they will get much more rotten.  We think that if we love the hurting part of ourselves, that's like a secret wink, a handshake under the table, a hypocritical ‘pass’ on our weaknesses and personal deficiencies. Many of us feel that we should have gotten over it by now and do not deserve to be given any slack.   

If we’re going to truly transform ourselves we have to extend loving kindness to our shadow, the part of us that feels like a failure, that feels weak and insecure, the part of us that is actually wounded.  Loving-kindness has to be extended especially to the parts of us that are suffering. 
   
Our willingness to experience what is actually going on in our head, heart and belly with the tenderness of a loving mother, allows our experiences to reveal their hidden side. We might recognize how, on some level, we have drawn particular experiences to ourselves in order to be able to love what is unlovable.  
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Only when we embrace all of ourselves, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, can we be fully present, and when we are fully present, the miracle of being is also be present. This is the highest form of love we can give ourselves.

This was an article published in Levenkunst journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server.

The Buddha taught that our thoughts manifest as words, and they in turn, manifest as behaviors, which develop into habits, and habits eventually harden into character or personality.  We might add that character is 'destiny'  in that the compelling power of our habitual patterns shape our lives in conformity with who we take ourselves to be.

The doctrine of karma is very subtle and complex.  Perhaps a brief re-telling of the timeless story in Genesis might be helpful.  Our primal ancestors, Adam and Eve, lived in perfect harmony in the garden of Eden. Fully weaved into the fabric of their surroundings, there was no need to ponder experiential options nor make decisions. They did not yet have a sense of being separate and distinct entities, standing apart from their surrounding environment.   

Their moment by moment experience was full and complete, and without any trace of lack, except of course, that they were without self-reflection. Not a word was spoken, nor a gesture made on behalf of a self-centered “me”.  When Eve and then Adam ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they abruptly entered the world of self and other, like and dislike, pleasure and pain, and for the first time feared for their lives. They gained the capacity to stand back from experience and create concepts in their minds, but lost their child-like innocence and spontaneity. Standing out and apart from nature, from each other, and even from themselves, they experienced self-consciousness, alienation and sorrow. This was the birth of time, individuality, choice and its consequences. They were now exiled from paradise.  

Interestingly, in this biblical narrative, God immediately appoints a cherub to stand guard at the entrance of Eden with a flaming sword, should the primal pair dare to return and eat from the tree of eternal life. God forbids that they should become as gods (enlightened)!

The exile from Eden was a necessary development in our evolution as a species. We needed to cut our umbilical connection with mother nature and develop an ego-self so that we could be self-reflective and be free to make choices. The development of the ego-self was an intermediary step in a larger evolutionary arc, potentially culminating in paradise regained.  

The birth and development of ego marked our alienation from being itself, our inherent Buddha nature. Once we separated from our essential nature and created an “observer” in here, and an “observed” world out there, we inadvertently created a psychological abyss. Samsara or collective neurosis, is both a symptom of our disconnection from our primordial nature, as well as our confused to search to recover it in all the wrong places.  

Because of this basic split we live with a distrust that we're not going to be taken care of unless we approach the world strategically.  This in turn causes us to engage in all kinds of manipulative behaviors driven by the desire for safety, security and certainty.  Identified with our idea of ourselves, we struggle with the profound ambivalence of seeking to return home to undivided, unbounded experience, and yet we are driven to maintain our separate, independent existence.    

At the core of every personality is a terrible conflict. The ego-self is an expression of both the loss of being and the simultaneous search for it. Each of us is motivated by the primary desire to feel whole, complete, and unified with experience.  It is the organismic wish to function spontaneously as an integrated human being, acting in accord with our own internal design, unobstructed by the feeling of deficiency or lack.
    
Secondary motivations and desires come from a place of deficiency.  They are a camouflage for the primary motivation of undivided experience. For instance, when we struggle to do things perfectly in order to be beyond criticism because of the unsuspected belief that something is wrong with ourselves. Feeling that we are not being loved a properly cared for, we may struggle to always feel needed and appreciated because of the unexpected belief in our unlovability. We might push ourselves to the point of exhaustion, striving to be successful and accomplished, largely because of the primitive belief that we are worthless unless our successes are recognized by admiring others. 
        
The question of motivation is essential to an understanding of karma. Karma teaches us that both self and world are created by causes and effects, actions and reactions.  The term karma comes from the Sanskrit root, kr, which means volitional or intentional action based on the idea of an individual self. Identified with our ego-self, we feel disconnected from our depths, from our innermost essence. Consequently, our desires are based on a nagging sense of deficiency, incompleteness and emptiness.  Ego seeks to remedy this problem while simultaneously trying to preserve itself, which is precisely the very cause of the problem! Karmic causation begins with the secondary reflex to stand outside of experience as an observer, as a separate entity, an 'I'.   
    
Buddhist psychology holds that every thought, word and action that is motivated by the sense of being a separate self, leaves a psychic trace or seed in our mind.  The implication is that experience prompted by deficiency desire (neurotic craving, aggression, denial/avoidance) leaves a trace.  Because every seed seeks completion or closure, every seed will reach a fruition at some undetermined time when the conditions are suitable. Consequently, we are pushed from within towards destinations not of our conscious choice, as we try to remedy a felt sense of dissatisfaction.  
    
Meditation works directly with the karmic force by embracing whatever state of mind we find ourselves in. By not giving obsessive attention to our discursive thoughts we don't nourish our karmic seeds by feeding them with our obsessive attention. As we witness the bureaucracy of our mind, we have less motivation to seek alternatives to the present moment because of our benevolent acceptance of what is.  We realize that based on innumerable karmic seeds planted in the past, various outer situations and inner landscapes will arise and fall, appear and gradually disappear. As meditative practitioners we remind ourselves that we are at the intersection of our own and others' karmic seeds coming to fruition. Buddhist practice suggests that we don't take samsara personally. This is precisely what cuts through karmic causation.  
    
In order to liberate ourselves we must first accept who we are, how we are, and where we are, and not impulsively seek alternatives to our present condition. We must also challenge the primitive belief that we’re missing something and that we’re in a state of lack or deficiency that needs to be remedied.  We already have Buddha in the palm of our hands!
    
On the Buddhist path what is crucial is whether or not our present motivation is to cultivate safety, security, and certainty or to protect our path of mindfulness and awareness.  This is the major fork in the dharma journey, moment by moment. To one side, is the samsaric alternative of thirsting for who or what we don't yet possess, hoping for an alternative to this present moment. To the other side, is the dharmic path leading to the appreciation of 'what is', experience undivided by a presumed inner witness who judges, interprets, and endlessly comments upon everything, alienating us from this living moment. 
    
To bring full conscious awareness into the world is to transcend the limited ego-self and to return to being, our essential awakened identity. This is the meaning of the term, Buddha.  Perhaps it is none other than eating from the tree of eternal life, the experience of nowness, free of past, present and future, free from sorrow.

At this very moment, we have the potential to be 'at one' with our experience, to fully embrace our immediate situation without resistance or manipulation. According to Buddhism, this "hands off " mode of experience is an expression of openness and natural intelligence. When we are intimate with our experience as it is, and not trying to make it other than what it is, the current of life flows between us and our surroundings in sympathetic patterns of interaction.

​This was an article published in Levenkunst journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server.        

Every culture through which Buddhism radiated its wisdom shaped the enlightened one's message to the mentality of its populace, and by doing so, offered novel and fresh opportunities for Buddha dharma to shine through.  In the present cross fertilization of East and West, contemporary Western culture and the ancient tradition of Buddhism are shining a light on each other's blind spot. Something very unique in the history of spirituality is being born.

As Buddhism is being transplanted in soil thousands of years and miles removed from its source, it creates an intriguing paradox.  On the one hand, the practice of  meditation opens us up to direct experience of our mind which transcends history and culture.  On the other hand,  personal experience cannot be divorced from the culturally specific forms through which it radiates. These forms must be honored or else personal experience loses its social and cultural context.

Before the Buddha uttered the first word of his teaching there was already a sacred culture in sixth century BCE India that was in existence for a thousand years.  For Indians living at that time, the world was already sacred, and the body was regarded as a temple that housed the transcendental dimension of spirit.  Ordinary people experienced the sacred as an imminent presence in the world around them as well as within themselves.  Humans, animals, plants, insects and rocks all shared the same divine life, which necessitated compassionate relationship with all of life.

In ancient India, and many of the traditional Asian countries in which Buddhism found a home, space was not experienced as empty, but replete with gods and goddesses. Time was not a linear progression marked by material progress, but felt to be cyclical much like the four seasons.  Geographical place was not just the neutral backdrop upon which to construct a city or civilization, but "place" was experienced as a unique configuration of mountains, streams, lakes and forests, and included the pattern of the winds and the particular animals that habituated a specific landscape. Place had a distinctive character with its own special vibration.      

As we listen, study and practice the ancient teachings of the Buddha, we might, from time to time, reflect upon how different we are from the early practitioners of Buddhism, and how radically different our culture is from the various Asian cultures within which Buddhism took root.    

Beginning in the 20th century the teachings of the Buddha have been mingling with the unique mentality and idiosyncrasies of our Western culture, with both our psychological sophistication and our materialistic orientation, our rugged individualism and our Promethean restlessness. Something very interesting is coming out of this brew.  We should be aware of what our cultural history has transmitted to us, for it has shaped our view of the world and how we relate with our spiritual path.     

We live in a culture that has been highly shaped by the god-centered theistic traditions of Judaism and Christianity.  Many of us are left with a hangover of sin and guilt, and doubt about our intrinsic goodness. The teaching that all sentient beings possess Buddha nature is both hopeful, but also extremely challenging for Westerners to embrace.  In the theistic traditions, as taught institutionally, God is situated in a transcendent abode, and we humans are rooted materially here on earth.  At best, we can dialogue with the deity through prayer and establish a relationship, but we never can be as God, that is, enlightened.      

By contrast, Buddha was not a god, but a spiritually awakened human being who revealed a body of methods for how we may realize that our essential nature is no different from his. This presents a radically different paradigm, as we struggle to align ourselves with our fundamental goodness and luminous awakened nature.  

​In contrast with the Buddhist message, which affirms the preciousness of our human birth and our original enlightened nature, there are psychological and socioeconomic forces working in exact opposition. Several developments in our cultural history have dramatically shaped our view of ourselves, displacing us from cosmic significance and eventually led to a mood of nihilistic doubt about our fundamental goodness.   

In the 19th century Darwin and his theory of natural selection proclaimed that we were an evolutionary link in a biological chain and not God's noble creation.  Sigmund Freud shocked the Western world with his pronouncement of an unconscious mind that shaped our thoughts, feelings and behaviors.  Human reason was now precariously poised on the surface of the primordial Id, which itself was a bull pen of sexual and aggressive instincts.  We were no longer masters of our own house, nor did the universe seem to revolve around us.  Karl Marx furthered our sense of displacement and disenchantment with his revelation that class struggle and the quest for power and control, are the underlying determinants of consciousness and history.  

Darwin, Freud and Marx contributed to the pervasive belief that our human awareness is shaped by unconscious, instinctual and socio-economic forces, and led to significant doubt about an inner dimension that transcended our social conditioning and our unnecessary suffering.  Each of their perspectives assumes an independently existing world that must be investigated by human reason. The implication is that there is no intrinsic meaning or purpose in nature or life itself.  We are left in a state of separation, in a world that has been stripped of the sacred.

Due to the capitalistic paradigm and its view of the economic marketplace as primary, every aspect of our lives has become quantified and monetized.  Our human relationships have been radically shaped by capitalism's right arm of advertising. The whole industry of advertising focuses entirely on image or surface appeal in order to elicit desire, rather than depth of feeling. We have been conditioned to be more interested in tantalizing things than in depth of experience.    

Advertising and the digital information revolution have created super samsara, as they cultivate obsessive desire for things that we don't truly need, consumer goods and services that don't touch our soul and which eventually leave us empty.  The unanticipated effect of this socio-cultural paradigm has been to radically shape our sense of time and space, so that contemporary people have profound intolerance of silence and stillness, and are all too eager to fill in what feels like a deficient emptiness. 

We bring this accelerated, distraction-oriented mentality into our relationship with the Buddha's dharma and our practice of meditation.  We are, more often than not, seeking a more gratifying or entertaining moment, then the one we are currently experiencing, whether that be during meditation practice, or when listening to a dharma talk.

Yet, the very same social system that I've been critiquing may also shine a light in certain areas of the ancient tradition of Buddhism, making explicit what has been only implicit in its doctrines.  Our emphasis on the primacy of the individual lends a personal face to the more universal Buddha nature.  We, in the West, will have to reconcile the paradox of the Buddhist no-self doctrine with our fierce belief in the individual personality.   
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With the advantage of Western psychology's understanding of psycho-social development, its insight into repression and the creation of a shadow personality, we now understand that "unfinished business" must first be worked through and integrated within the personality before it can be disowned in meditation. Any suppressed psychic material gets channeled to the non conscious areas of the mind from where it is projected onto otherwise neutral situations.  This is a major cause of our neurotic behaviors and our interpersonal conflicts.  

Meditation could be misused to avoid or deny painful areas of ourselves, and could further suppress what needs dialogue and understanding.  The potential danger of the teaching on egolessness for Westerners, especially women, is the tendency to sacrifice their own inner voice and their identities by merging with their significant others and their families.
For those who have been socially or politically marginalized in our society or traumatized for various reasons, their inner voices have been squelched for too long.  They need emotional support and permission to first find their voice by permitting their thoughts and feelings so that they can be heard, understood and their issues and problems finally resolved. Only then can disidentification be a useful method.  
    
Also those with poorly formed ego "structures" due to various developmental arrests, could bypass the need for processing "unfinished business" in favor of the egoless state.  This would amount to a regression to a pre-egoic state and get completely confused with a genuinely transpersonal state of development.  

Buddhism in the West is being challenged by women's greater participation and assumption of teaching and administrative roles within various Buddhist communities. Historically, this may be the most radical influence in the transplantation of Buddha's dharma in Western soil. The feminist perspective emphasizes interconnectedness, the importance of body, nature and intimate relationships.  It’s critique of Buddhism and religions in general, is that they have been historically male centric, emphasizing autonomy, independence and achievement, while the more feminine qualities of connection, relationship and communion have been devalued.  

Such feminine qualities are a necessary counter-force to help balance the more prevalent androcentric qualities in all organizations, secular and spiritual.  After all, it was Prometheus, a very masculine hero, who, in the name of freedom, declared his independence from nature, and valorized the primacy of the individual ego, but dissociated himself from the feminine. 

The resurgence of the feminine can be seen in the positive revisioning of the body, feelings, imagination and intuition. The feminist perspective emphasizes embodied experience rather than detached observation, and feeling to help balance cognitive understanding. Women place greater emphasis on embodiment and nature, healing and wholeness, as opposed to the more male tendency towards emotional detachment, transcendence and spiritual attainment. Women's spirituality places greater emphasis on emotional bonding and communication, which could potentially heal the dissociation between men and women, and culture and nature.     

​The feminist emphasis on “all-inclusiveness" honors the naming of all dimensions of human experience, giving permission for multiple narratives to have a place. This lends value and meaning to that which is named.  The strategic failure to name particular aspects of human experience, denies reality to what is not named, which is often the experiences of women and those who have been socially marginalized. The all-inclusive perspective is a critique of all monological systems of thought that favor abstraction and absolute principles over multiplicity, multidimensionality and complexity. Interestingly, the principle of all inclusiveness suggests that there's no underlying solid, separate and continuous self, a view which echoes the anatman or no-self doctrine of Buddhism. 
    
Lastly, the feminist emphasis on embodiment and nature, highlights the need to rediscover feminine faces for the sacred. This challenges Buddhist practitioners and communities to explore the interrelationship between our bodies and the body of mother nature.  Discovering new forms of engagement and integration between ecology and the Buddhist sense of the sacred is of great importance in rendering Buddhism’s message relevant to the immediate global crisis facing our planet. 

Within the ecological movement, we in the West are developing wider, more inclusive images of personal identity that include nonhuman life on our planet. We may be arriving at a novel understanding and expression of the Buddhist notion of egolessness or no-self, as we cultivate an ecological self,  a more permeable sense of self that experiences our body as inseparable from the body of nature, the world, and eventually the cosmos. 


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There is a dark side of the mind that many spiritual practitioners unwittingly avoid. We could meditate for many years and still be plagued by agonizing emotional patterns, dysfunctional behaviors, and addictions of all stripes and colors. Meditation or prayer doesn’t always shine a light into these areas because our shadows are heavily defended. 
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This was an article published in Levenkunst journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server.
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    If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you.
If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
                                —Jesus
There is a dark side of the mind that many spiritual practitioners unwittingly avoid. We could meditate for many years and still be plagued by agonizing emotional patterns, dysfunctional behaviors, and addictions of all stripes and colors. Meditation or prayer doesn’t always shine a light into these areas because our shadows are heavily defended. 

Meditation may reveal the transparency of the ego, who we take ourselves to be, but that is only half the story. We also struggle to not be the person who we secretly suspect we are. The shadow, a term of coined by the Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung, is the aspect of ourselves that we have suppressed. Through meditation we could eventually see through our persona, the social face of ego, while our shadow remains invisible as a psychological force that shapes our thought and behavior.

The shadow holds the wounded and broken parts of ourselves, the failed ideals, the fateful consequences of poor choices. It is the inferior, unprocessed, or undeveloped aspects of our personality that our social mask hides. These are the contradictory aspects of personality where we feel most vulnerable, deficient and shamed. They are the very areas that we’re most resistant to communicate with, yet they contain missing pieces of our wholeness.

The rejected or disowned shadow self is a natural consequence of the ego building process, consisting of those qualities that were forbidden or denied by our family of origin. These unacceptable and unacknowledged qualities accumulate to form an inferior personality with its own thoughts, feelings and behaviors. The shadow does not want to be revealed or known and so it feels alien to us, like a dark twin or evil other. 

​The problem of the shadow is not its real psychological existence, but its denial. In our effort to ignore our own dark self, we tend to deny our possible greed, hypocrisy, cowardice, our obsessions and addictions, or our capacity for destructiveness. Every time we avoid or dissociate from the parts of ourselves that feel distasteful, unacceptable or threatening, we are abandoning ourselves.
     
In our misguided effort to avoid contamination with our own imperfection, we tend to manufacture enemies or adversaries who become sacrificial scapegoats, imagined embodiments of what we have disowned in ourselves. It is a psychological law that whatever aspects of ourselves we reject, we project onto others.

The shadow is like a silent underground stream that runs beneath a city. It is a silent other that runs underneath our persona, but which becomes accentuated when we love or hate, or experience intense jealousy or anger, or when we feel utterly buoyant and celebratory. It often breaks through the cracks in our self-image or persona when we are experiencing extreme emotion. 
    
We can recognize the shadow by its vehemence, the intensity of our emotions that are disproportionate to the faults of a targeted individual or group, or the situation at hand. A comment or a certain look from another, the appearance of injustice or exploitation, a controversial opinion expressed by a friend challenging our own, all can trigger places within us where we are unresolved.
    
While shopping at the mall we might witness several teenagers with sagging trousers, carrying skateboards, who are speaking loudly and laughing uproariously. From our perspective they seem to be oblivious to the other shoppers and lack all sense of propriety. This ordinary scene immediately provokes our angry subvocal narrative and negative judgment. We might be oblivious to our own rigid hyper-control and inhibition to let loose and be silly. The stark contrast between our own goodness, orderliness, or rightness and the teens wrongness or chaotic behavior has triggered us. The sudden upsurge of emotion is the tip-off that we are in shadow land. 
    
This kind of black and white thinking and blind negativity can be found in racism, male chauvinism, class warfare, homophobia and gay bashing, which are examples of collective shadow projection. As meditators or spiritual practitioners, when we are working with our shadows, we are dealing with something that has immense implications.
    
One method to elicit your own shadow is to engage in a self-dialogue, asking to speak to different parts of yourself. This can be done with a partner or through journal writing. For instance, you may ask to speak to the part of yourself that is shamefully inhibited, or the part of yourself that is unambitious and lazy, or ruthless and opportunistic, or perhaps the part of yourself that is fearful, needy and dependent. 
    
You call forth one of your hidden faces and engage it in a dialogue as if it were a psychological twin, as a way of looking behind your persona. Ask this part of yourself what it really wants, and why it feels the need to hide in the shadows. Then you morph into that aspect of yourself and speak from its point of view back to yourself.
    
Another method to smoke out your shadow, is to describe in detail an imaginary or actual adversary or enemy by writing down his or her qualities. Without editing your initial feelings, describe how dislikeable, disgusting, immoral, or horrible this person is. This imagined individual probably contains qualities that are completely opposite from your own, qualities that you have forbidden yourself from experiencing, and consequently which have been buried. Welcome to your evil twin!

​The question naturally arises, “Does that mean that we all are just like our enemies, horrible, disgusting and immoral? No, but because we have rejected certain taboo aspects of ourselves, they have become distorted, magnified and emotionally charged over time, and now appear to be either grotesque or exceedingly shameful. They do not represent our totality, but are psychological islands that have split off from the mainland of our wholeness.
    
Whenever we shine the light of awareness onto patterns that we have disowned, we are taking ownership of what we have denied and projected onto others. Our vices, our imperfections, our neuroses and our dark passions, reveal something essential about our human nature, something that needs to be worked through and not abandoned. The shadow holds our buried potentials. 
    
The shadow includes the unlived life because we can’t be fully alive if we are crushed by secret fears and shame. As we learn to make a relationship with the shadow dimensions of ourselves, our identity expands immeasurably. We are reclaiming psychological territory which was formally held in an unconscious domain. Working with our shadow can heal us by increasing our capacity to be alive, to be whole and therefore to be more present to our surrounding world.
    
On the Buddhist path we extend maitri or loving kindness to our shadows so that we are more able to feel compassion for the broken, vulnerable and wounded parts of our personality. Extending loving kindness to ourselves creates a fierce fire. Yet, it is precisely these forgotten aspects of ourselves that cry out for our love so that we can be healed and whole. To our surprise, we might discover that the shadow contains tremendous energy which could be used to further our spiritual or dharma path. 
    
Through the process of disidentifying from who we think we are and from who we are afraid of becoming shadow, we come closer to embracing our true identity as the profound formless depth at our core. When we hold our shadow in tension with our persona, identifying with neither, we are closer to experiencing our egoless Buddha nature. 
    
The Buddha proclaimed 2600 years ago that the self we thought we were, did not exist. Perhaps in the 21st century, integrating meditation with shadow work will bring us closer to this realization.

This was an article published in Elephant journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server. 

Meditation suggests that it is refreshing to meet the nakedness of situations with your own nakedness, here and now.  Outside of nowness we fail to genuinely appreciate our lives because we are struggling to survive in time,  projecting ourselves into the future or attempting to resolve the past.
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As spiritual practitioners it is necessary to question who we are in essence, beyond our social roles as parents, spouses, family members, friends and colleagues, and beyond our occupational roles.  What is this human life really about?  

The good news is that the tradition of Buddhism addresses this question by offering a method of inquiry. Meditation is a profound practice that has come down to us from 2600 years ago.  We have the recipe for how to discover our essential nature as a human being.  If you give yourself to the practice of meditation wholeheartedly, you will meet yourself face to face.

In this moment if you allow yourself to become sensitive to your immediate condition, you will discover that you are breathing with ease. You might notice also that your chest and abdomen are rising and falling rhythmically with the cyclical movement of breath.  You are not  required to perform the activity of breathing, for it is already handled by your autonomic nervous system,  as is the beating of your heart and the circulation of your blood.  At this moment you might notice a panoramic view of rolling hills or a skyline of skyscrapers out your window or hear the hum of cars on the freeway.  It is not necessary to struggle to see the landscape or hear the cars any better than you already do. You are not required to struggle to maintain your existence. 

I have been describing basic being, the most fundamental sense of what it is to be a human being. This quality of being exists before we divided the world into good and bad, inner and outer, past and future.  Basic being is the human capacity to experience ‘things as they are’  before we project our labels onto them. We could call this naked experience isness or suchness, which is a translation of the Sanskrit term, tathata.  The secret for how to experience this natural quality is to completely open to this arising moment, this second!  

In the moment that we touch it with awareness, we must also refrain from holding onto it, from trying to make it our personal territory.  We touch the immediacy of this living moment and let go, trusting that it will return. Usually we slip off that razor-sharp edge of nowness due to our habitual hunger for distraction and entertainment.  We're not sure how to name this loss of balance, or whether to even call it a problem since this seems so normal. But this so-called normalcy is sheer madness.  It is the unconscious rejection of the ‘here and now’ in favor of the ‘then and there‘, as we hope for a more gratifying moment than the one we’re already in.

When we're not living in the immediacy of now, there's a feeling that we're distant from the hot center of our lives.  We feel disconnected from the joy that we may have remembered as kids, that free-floating spontaneous sense of ‘mindless’ happiness.  To miss these precious moments means that we are lost in action,  hitchhiking between memory and desire.
The practice of meditation returns us again and again to this basic space of nowness from which our lives unfold.  This basic space is none other than Buddha nature and it is our natural inherita

​Buddhism states that although wisdom, compassion and peacefulness are our fundamental inheritance as human beings, we mistakenly identify Buddha nature with the ego-self, our mental picture of ourselves, which is only a fragment of our inconceivable totality.  The dimension within us that is basic being has depth, value, relatedness, and real substance. It is a sense of presentness and presence. The secret is that it is revealed only when we show up in our totality, with our head, heart, and belly.
     
It takes tender courage to sit and face our fears and our depressions, to discover the deepest elements of mind and body without trying to change them, in order to see the truth of  ‘what is’.  Such tender courage allows us to cultivate deep listening from the heart.  By allowing space so that we can appreciate very simple experiences, we discover our awakened heart.
    
The most fundamental experience is that of being alive as a human being, prior to accomplishing anything or fulfilling our desires.  We must dare to claim the right to be here on this good earth, at this precious time.  Meditation encourages us to communicate with all aspects of our being and all aspects of experience.  In order to do this we must be vulnerable, gentle, tender and open to all aspects of ourselves, the good and the bad,  the ugly and the beautiful. 
    
To allow ourselves to be touched by basic being means that we drop our map and our agenda over and over again.  We drop our strongly held beliefs and open to the possibility that our life may turn out to be completely other than what we had thought.  When we are not holding ourselves so tightly, we have the chance to see both ourselves and the world without wanting either to be different from the way they are.  We don't always love our partners, our parents or our good friends.  To hold onto such beliefs may prevent us from meeting the moment we're already in.
    
Losing a job is supposed to be unfortunate, and breaking up with a loved one is supposed to be terribly sad and gut wrenching.  Perhaps such endings lead to a more creative job or a new beautiful life with someone else. We could discover a mixture of devastation and delight.  
    
Meditation suggests that it might be refreshing to approach everyday life without armor, meeting its nakedness with our own.  We reach a point where we recognize that we don't have to change ourselves, our spouses, or our friends, in an attempt to make them better.  The situations that we find ourselves in may be fine the way they are.  What if situations don't have to be anything other than what they are.      
    
We develop maitri or friendliness to ourselves by not judging what arises in our experience of meditation. Without this intimate connection to ourselves we cannot appreciate our world or be of service to anyone else.  Only when we establish an intimate connection with all aspects of ourselves without judgment, do we experience a sense of wholeness, a sense of being of one piece. 

This was an article published in Elephant journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server. 

Spiritual teachers are frequently asked by their students how to practice meditation in everyday life with all of its distractions and demands. Practitioners genuinely want to know how to make a connection between the inspiration and clarity that they feel while doing sitting meditation and walking the path of ordinary life.  A Zen Buddhist teacher may abruptly exclaim, “The apple blossoms have arrived early” or “That blind man’s tapping cane,” drawing the student’s attention to the sights and sounds of the everyday world as the path. Yet, our lives are continually distorted by our wish to be relieved from boredom, emotional flatness and from our silent worries.

We could define samsara, the Buddhist term for collective neurosis, as the misguided search to find a remedy for our dissatisfaction and sense of emptiness in all the wrong places. In our hunger to find something that is distracting, exciting, or hopeful, we tend to overlook the seemingly inconsequential details of our everyday lives, but such details are the path. The secret for how to bring meditation into everyday life is to make room for the ordinary. We have to trim our eagerness for the ‘extraordinary’ and return to the immediacy of this precious moment unfolding before our eyes.

​For our everyday lives to become art, the practice of panoramic awareness is indispensable. Buddhist meditation involves both mindfulness and awareness. Mindfulness or shamatha is the dispassionate observation of our mind’s contents with accuracy and precision. Just this single thought or image, now! And just this immediate pain in my knee, now.

Awareness or vipashyana is tuning in to the larger space within which these contents arise. It is the inquisitive aspect of mind that lends meaning and value to the individual thoughts, images and feelings that arise in sitting practice. It is an expanded sensitivity to and appreciation of the forms, textures and colors of our sensory world. Vipashyana suggests that we cultivate an unlimited openness to hear, touch and feel both our inner world and the outer phenomenal world, permitting both to ‘speak’ to us in their own language.  We use all of our senses in order to be in total communication with our environment, understanding that it exists in sympathetic relationship with our five senses. There’s some kind of underlying communication that’s taking place all the time between our senses and the surrounding atmosphere.

When we relate to our world from our heart it becomes very personal and intimate. We perceive a living, breathing world, a sacred world, but not one of inert objects and anonymous entities. Our everyday life is made up of countless details, shifting textures and emotional nuances that lend personal meaning and value to ordinary things and events. We might walk into our home this evening and notice that we feel a special fondness for our soft leather recliner. This recliner has caressed our body like an affectionate mother, supporting us so that our mind could be free to entertain lofty ideas and explore visionary possibilities. Feeling appreciation for our recliner evokes its soul, suddenly making it come alive and take on character.

There’s a strong temptation to ignore what is beautiful or exquisite in favor of what is practical or profitable. Yet our human heart has a logic of its own, which is often at variance with our habits. To live close to the heart opens us to beauty, love and the sacred, as well as to feelings of emptiness, loss and despair. To live with such feeling-awareness is to live at our depth, which adds richness, texture, tone, and expanded meaning to our experiences.

Panoramic awareness relates to the things and beings of our everyday world as intimate partners. Appreciating the surrounding energetic field in which everyday things take their life, we’re able to perceive their natural vividness and innocent vitality.When we relate to our world as a living world, and not as one surrounded by lifeless objects, we transform an otherwise material world into a world with soul. When we look at the world through our heart we bring the meditative state of mind and the artists’ eye to our ordinary life.

After meditation practice this morning, I went for a short hike. The wind blew a crisp yellow autumn leaf across the pavement, which made a scuttling sound. All I could hear in that timeless moment was the lonely ‘voice’ of that autumn leaf beckoning me. That leaf was the essence of autumn, of all autumn’s that ever were or ever will be, symbolizing both nature’s fruition but also death. I felt melancholy and had an intimation of my own death, which simply felt like a part of the natural order of things, part of a lawful cycle that is timeless. Such intimate communication between us and the phenomenal world seduces the world to reveal its secret dimensions.

In order to heal the split between our invisible inner world and the hard realities of ordinary life, every aspect of our life will need our love and attention so that it may reveal its hidden side. We might engage the events, situations and relationships of our everyday world not for the sake of overcoming life’s struggles, but to appreciate our existence more fully.
Such an orientation towards our everyday life has immense energy and the potential to reframe mundane events with meaning and significance. It may also enable us to recognize patterns of connection that help us understand our human existence, our place in the immense design of things.

Having courage to face the unknown, a brilliant color emerges and interrupts our train of thought, a sound shatters our discursive thinking, someone touches us gently and our hearts melt. When we perceive ordinary phenomena in this naked fashion there is an abrupt discontinuity in the usual flow of things. This is what allows us to see things in their innate essence and nature. This is how we bring meditation and elegance into our lives.

In the crisp immediacy of nowness, we recognize the uniqueness of each moment and everyday things. Art in everyday life is the deepening or intensifying of experience that gives new significance to the ordinary things and beings of our world. It is feeling the breath of life pulsating in and through ordinary events and activities. We might regain a child-like sensitivity to the immediate freshness of this moment, as we find ourselves more fully alive, enjoying an abundant life without shame

This was an article published in Elephant journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server.

Like dogs, we have been faithfully chasing all the stuff that the mind throws to us for a long time. We have not caught on that this game is not going anywhere. There is no ultimate stick that ends the game. The mind continues to throw out an endless array of sticks and we chase them, and for most people this madness is considered normal.

The lion is not fooled by the game of sticks. It looks directly at the thrower of the sticks. The lion-like meditator does not chase the mind’s productions but instead looks directly at the mechanism of mind, its entire bureaucracy and how it works.

When we go after the stick and identify with it, we are taken for a ride to nowhere. This is the default practice of mindlessness or madness. When a thought, image, memory or desire arises in the mind and we recognize it for what is, we are disidentifying with it, letting it go. This is the practice of mindfulness.

When we look directly at the mind itself and recognize the pointlessness of the game of chasing sticks, this is called insight or vipashyana in Sanskrit. It is a recognition, a knowing again, but from a larger perspective. In spite of such insight, due to the conditioning that we have been subject to our entire lives, initially, all we can do is catch a glimpse of this neurotic pattern. The weight of conditioning pulls us back into our habitual way of being stick chasers.

The chasing of the mind’s productions is what is called samsara in the Buddhist tradition. Samsara is a collective neurosis, marked by restlessness, impulsivity, and dissatisfaction. It is the unbroken wheel of wanting what you can’t get, getting what you don’t want, or eventually getting who or what you thought you wanted, only to find out that you’re still not completely satisfied.

Samsara is based on not trusting our mind as it is, nor the world as it is. The implication is that we all feel a sense of personal deficiency, that we’re not enough. Metaphorically, samsara is a restless animal. It is hungry for stimulation and distraction, and it moves over the landscape of our lives stalking anything that promises to fill its emptiness. It will devour anything that catches its attention in order to expand its empire.

No matter how often it feeds itself, running tirelessly after what it thinks is nourishment, it remains hungry. As many times as it wards off others, who appear threatening, it never feels entirely safe. If you watch this animal from an aerial point of view, it cuts a zigzag path, alternately devouring what is pleasurable or chasing away what is threatening. It is both hungry and fearful. The animal of samsara is hard to recognize because its bushy tail sweeps away its own tracks. When you try to follow it to observe its behavior and its eating habits, you can’t find its footprints.

That bushy tail is what the Buddhist tradition calls ignorance, the avoidance of the truth of “what is.” In Western psychological terms, neurosis could be a substitute for samsara. Neurosis also hides from itself by resorting to defense mechanisms, which block awareness of painful truths. As a result, we feel at a distance from ourselves, disconnected and separate from our seamless totality

This feeling of separation causes a great deal of pain which underlies our search to always feel better. We all want to find some sort of grand remedy so that we don’t have to feel so divided between our animal self and our spiritual self, between our body and our mind, between ourselves and others.

​Everyone you see is fighting a battle that you know nothing about. As you walk the streets of your hometown or city, whomever you come across is also fighting a silent battle. Everyone experiences a vague sense of lack, a deficient emptiness or hollowness. We all carry on the necessary business of everyday life and we function in various social roles, but rarely do we recognize this battle. We are carrying an unnameable burden from which we want relief, and this is how we get seduced into chasing innumerable sticks.

Some of us are afraid of being abandoned and so we struggle to become indispensable to our mates, hopefully guaranteeing that they will stay in love with us. Others are afraid of failure, and so they constantly struggle to achieve success as they are compulsively driven towards accomplishment and achievement. Some struggle with the secret belief that they are not intelligent. They may get extra degrees, or take a steady stream of adult education courses in order to feel wise, but the shadow of personal deficiency still plagues them.

Many individuals struggle with the feeling that they don’t have what it takes to survive in a dog-eat-dog world, and that they’re one of the runts who’s not going to thrive in the contest of life. They struggle to align with strong people and then perhaps marry them. Some of us feel that we do not possess intrinsic value, that we’re insignificant, and that we don’t count. We struggle to meet others’ needs and wants as a way of earning personal worthiness.

I have been describing samsara as it appears in the form of personality dynamics which reveal different styles of chasing the mind‘s projections or “sticks.” The good news is that Buddhism invites us to bring our neurotic struggle with us to the path. We bring our obsessive compulsiveness, our arrogance, our hysteria, our feeling of being poverty stricken to the meditation cushion.

​If we are going to transform ourselves from dogs to lions, we must look at the mind in its nakedness and sees that it spontaneously projects thoughts, images, and narratives onto the world. The lion is not fooled into thinking that the world actually contains those qualities. The lion discovers that when it doesn’t feed those projections with attention, they dissolve of their own.

At that moment, the lion discovers the truth of “what is”—the mind’s innocence. With this recognition comes a peacefulness from knowing that there’s no need for struggle, no need to grasp, reject or ignore the truth of what is. In this state, our personality becomes transparent permitting our Buddha nature to shine through. By living with such intimacy, we discover the sacredness of everyday life.

This was an article published in Levenkunst journal which is no longer supporting its online articles on my website server. 

In truth, moment by moment, we are confronted with the unknown. None of us knows what the next moment will bring. According to Buddhist psychology, with the arising of each moment we find ourselves momentarily uncertain and apprehensive, but these gaps are beneath our radar. Ego deflects attention away from this gap of uncertainty and ambiguity by provoking us to make a familiar gesture.   

                                                 LIVING  IN THE MOMENT 
 
Sitting down with a friend or intimate we might immediately make small talk to break the awkwardness of silence and to avoid the nakedness of simply looking at one another, which is so revealing. The spinning of thoughts is a marvellous strategy for deceiving ourselves. It is similar to twirling a lit incense stick in a circular motion at night. It offers the visual illusion of an unbroken circle. Ego uses the same strategy with thoughts, images and feelings, creating the convincing sense of a solid and continuous entity, 'me' while reinforcing our familiar description of the world.

Moments of uncertainty are like being a foreign country where you don't speak the language and where you've lost both your wallet and your passport. In the Tibetan Buddhist teachings, that bare moment is called a bardo. This gap or interval is a wrinkle in time, between the ending of one thing and the beginning of the next. Here there are no familiar reference points to reinforce our sense of self. There are many potential possibilities in that gap, but we are not taught by our parents or our teachers to value this gap.

Mindfulness, on and off the cushion, is the practice of leaning into this edge of uncertainty, where we can glimpse the mechanics of experience directly. In the usual flow of our daily routines we do not objectively witness the infrastructure of what we commonly refer to as ’myself’. Buddhism teaches us that when our attention is distracted away from the experience of now-ness, there is a tendency to go on automatic pilot. We insert habitual thoughts, feelings and behaviour into the neutral space of now- ness, and are then reassured that we know who we are.

The history of ego is the constant effort to seek confirmation in the eyes of the world to reassure ourselves that our self-image or self-concept is reinforced. The result is that we create a cocoon of safety and security, but we risk repeating ourselves without ever feeling that our life is a genuine journey. The Buddhist path inspires us to cultivate the courage of a warrior so that we are more willing to open into that naked space of now- ness without overlaying it with our old patterns.

From a meditators’ point of view, the gap or the moment of now-ness, holds the secret of our egoless identity. It reveals that we are more a field of awareness rather than a solid centre in here. In moments of clarity we suspect that ego doesn't speak for our totality. Ego colonizes our experiences, separating us from the larger source of energy that is the world. In the experience of now-ness, we do not stand out and apart from experience, but we’re it, the entire field of experience. We are not who we think are, and that thought is both terrifying and liberating.

In order for our spiritual path to evolve it is necessary to develop appreciation for neutral space, to actually communicate with those gaps before we go on automatic pilot. What would this look like? Can you remember a time when you paused momentarily just before you were about to bite into a peach, and suddenly inhaled its sweet fragrance or were delighted by its pastel red colour? Can you remember a time when you were fully present with a loved one, as a precious moment was unfolding, and your heart opened? Can you stop the world for a moment in order to hear the melodious chirping of a bird, or delight in the cool breeze moving across your face that playfully tussles your hair?

Initially these moments can be disorienting because they break up the hypnotic flow of our habitual activities. By interrupting our continuous mind static we challenge our tired categories that frame the world into good and bad, ugly and the beautiful. By actually pausing and learning to appreciate those moments of uncertainty, we enter into intimate relationship with the always naked quality of now-ness.

The experience of now-ness offers a brightness that allows for insight and understanding, and a heat that radiates both passion and compassion. When we open to this energy without ego's manipulations it inspires us to appreciate this wonderful natural world in spite of all the terrible things occurring on the planet.

Living within this openness is unchartered. There is no map, so the quality of experience is very fresh and revealing. The unfolding of our very lives provides the guidance necessary for life to be a journey, liberated from ego's tyranny. 

​At this time, many of us in the Western world are coming out of our Covid cocoons, and are beginning to resume the communal activities of socializing with friends and relatives, sharing meals, and walking and talking without masks, given the recent CDC recommendations. Although here in the U.S., we’re experiencing a flattening of the COVID curve, as restrictions are being lifted, the psychological effects of lockdowns, loneliness, boredom, illness, job loss, and the grief that comes with these losses, lingers. The pandemic hasn’t ended, and neither has the pervasive feeling of uncertainty about the COVID variants that could possibly evade the vaccine’s protective barrier. Although more people are returning to work and schools, and businesses are reopening, many are still feeling the effects of the pandemic and are unsure about how to re-enter their new “abnormal” life.

                                                        Indra’s net
One of the well-known metaphors that Buddhism use s to portray the interconnectedness of all life is the image of the god Indra and his mythological net of jewels. Indra’s net symbolizes the universe as a web of interdependent connections among all of its members, stretching out infinitely in all directions. Each jewel both reflects and is reflected by all the others, illustrating the principle that whatever affects one jewel, affects them all.

Although this metaphor relates to the nature of the universe, it’s principles could also be applied to how we can create an enlightened society and a sane world. If we take this metaphor personally, it suggests that we are all microcosmic universes. Our basic orientation about life that shapes how we communicate with others, how we handle with our emotions, and determines the sacrifices we’re willing to make to fulfill our reason for being here—all reflect the kind and quality of person we are. 

Indra's net suggests that we can't afford to keep parts of ourselves separate and hidden from each other. In order to live with integrity, our many aspects and dimensions need to be in communication with each other, so that it all feels part of one fabric. In the absence of such integration, we become overly identified with an iconic image of ourselves—our ego-self—and the personal story that goes with that image. Inadvertently, this disconnects us from significant parts of ourselves which become isolated islands separated from our mainland.

We can't embrace our intrinsic wholeness or Buddha nature if we are concealing something within ourselves that feels unacceptable. To live authentically is having the courage to extend understanding and compassion to the very parts that feel strange or alien.

The ego, the idea we have ourselves, serves as a kind of psychic immune system. Our biochemical immune system distinguishes what is a natural part our body from any foreign entities such as bacteria or viruses that may threaten our health. By detecting what it perceives as alien, the immune system preserves the integrity of our body by fighting off any invading bacteria or viruses. Our ego has a similar function, but it is psychological. It distinguishes itself from what it perceives as other than itself. Ego’s agenda is to divide our world between self and not-self, the latter often possessing qualities that feel alien to who we think we are.               

                                               A Sane Society and World
When we apply the principles of interconnection and interpenetration, symbolized by Indra’s net, to our society, we begin to realize that there aren't single societal issues that can be truly divorced from the larger social-political-environmental contexts in which they occur, nor can these issues be treated as individual or private problems. The Covid pandemic and our current ecological crisis reveals that we are so much more interconnected to one another than we previously thought.

Although the numerous global crises that threaten our planet are quite complex, they can be boiled down to a distorted idea of self—the highly individualized self, our “skin-encapsulated ego.” This view of self falsifies human beings by inflating the supremacy of the individual, while failing to recognize our interdependence with the greater systems of life of which we are a part.

As a result, we can be highly insensitive or oblivious to the negative impact that we have on other species as well as the rest of the natural world. Remarkably, Western industrialized societies have bought into the myth that they live on top of nature, rather than embedded within it. 

The sense of the sacred, our intuitive sense of a larger reality, the ultimate mystery that holds us all—has been superseded by the relentless push towards endless material progress, ever-expanding GDP, and an obsessive preoccupation with wealth and self-aggrandizement. This is an age marked by rampant racism, an obsession with power and profit, and a blatant disregard for truth and scientific evidence. Our planet and its people are in peril largely because of our failure to feel our intrinsic, undeniable connection with each other. Sadly, large portions of the population no longer deeply feel their connection with family, community, the natural environment, as well as with peoples of other cultures, as indigenous people around the world demonstrate daily.

Because of our illusory sense of immunity from the consequences of our individual actions, our species has consumed practically all of the world’s wild spaces, harvested the oceans, razed the forests, and are burning thousands of acres of our planet’s jungles. Nearly a million species are on the verge of extinction, including the decimation of insect populations, not least of which are the pollinators, upon which our entire food chain depends.
            
                                             The Anthropocene

The COVID pandemic is another reminder that we are in a new geological era, the Anthropocene, where human beings have become the single dominant force of change on the planet, and are radically altering the entire natural world. As we continue to exploit the wild spaces of Earth without regard for the likely consequences—AIDS, SARS, Zika, dengue, and Covid have all migrated from the wild into large swaths of humanity. Covid is just the last of  many pathogens that were warning signals to humanity that we’ve pushed beyond our natural limits.

Deforestation, mining, livestock and agribusiness degrade wildlife habitat, leaving animals no choice but to move closer to humans, potentially bringing pathogens along with them. These violations cannot be separated from the Covid-19 pandemic, nor from the likelihood that we will have to contend with new viruses in the years to come. This should provoke us to think collectively about living in more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature.    

These crises cannot be separated from the crisis of the massive inequalities in wealth, income and power. In order to incentivize private enterprise and individual profit, journalist Naomi Klein points out that many Western governments have attempted to underfund services, such as “state-funded health care, clean water, good public schools, safe workplaces, pensions, and other programs to care for the elderly and disadvantaged.”  The people who will either die or be most affected by such a reckless policy will be those who are regarded as disposable—the elderly, the destitute, poor people of color, and undocumented immigrants—the “others.”

                                                A Vision of Possibility

At the same time, the magnitude of these crises offers new possibilities in which people can begin to rethink what kind of society, world and future they want to inhabit. We still have the opportunity to reimagine a world that can heal the rupture between the separate self, humanity in all of its diversity, and the natural world. We can begin the process of redefining what it means to be a human being and what responsibilities we must bear in order to restore balance to ourselves and our world.

One of the revolutions that Buddha initiated in his time was the suspension of the Indian caste system that placed individuals in specific social categories, keeping them bound to these social structures intergenerationally. Buddha encouraged men and women from all walks of life and from all social castes to be part of his community of practitioners. When more individuals speak from their minds and hearts, the greater the collective wisdom of the group, and the wiser each individual becomes. The greater the diversity of age, gender, culture, religion, and race the greater a society’s resilience in times of crisis, and the greater is potential for creative innovation.        

​It is only through an expanded sense of identity with other peoples, other nations, other species, and with nature itself, that we have the possibility of establishing a sane society and world.

                                             The Enemy Maker
                                      Start with an empty canvas
                                      Sketch in broad outline the forms of
                                      men, women, and children.
                                     
                                      Dip into the unconscious well of your own
                                      disowned darkness 
                                      with a wide brush and
                                      stain the strangers with the sinister hue
                                      of the shadow.
   
                                      Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
                                      Hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
                                      Your own….
                                      Exaggerate each feature until man is
                                      Metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect….

                                      When your icon of the enemy is complete
                                      You will be able to kill without guilt,
                                      slaughter without shame….
                                                        by Sam Keen

Recently, human rights defenders took to the streets of New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities to demand an end to violence and hatred against Asian Americans in the wake of a mass shooting in Georgia,--six of whom were women of Asian descent. This recent wave of racist attacks have surged during the coronavirus pandemic. Such hateful racism is despicable, but unfortunately, not new. It speaks to something within our psyche that is as old as our human history, yet it needs to be unpacked and made part of our public discourse, again and again. The Covid pandemic is literal and needs to be treated as such, but it is also a metaphor for the psychic viruses within ourselves that we attempt to disown and project onto others. ​

                                                 Persona and Shadow

​The denial of our own darkness is grounded in us from childhood. Early in life we are conditioned by our family and our culture to separate our “good self” or persona from the “bad self” or shadow. The shadow is a term coined by depth psycholgist, C.G. Jung, to refer to the unacceptable parts of ourself that we unconsciously deny.

To speak of the shadow is another way of referring to our sense of inferiority, the rejected parts of ourselves that we want most to forget. We all want to eliminate this inferiority, and the most deceptive way of doing this is by looking for everything dark and “evil” in others. The shadow symbolizes the “other”, the alien, the foreigner for whom we feel no connection and no sympathy. We deny our unwanted qualities and target those who seem to possess some convenient “hook” upon which we can hang our own “impurities.” Now our own disowned negativities conveniently reappear in them, but ironically they confront us as our own hidden face.
 
​                                                           Enemy Making
    
Our persona or preferred social face is largely formed in accordance with the values and characteristics of our family of origin and our culture. On a sociological level, this process is driven by our need to gain membership in our family and eventually in our culture. On a more primal psychological level, the formation of the persona is driven by a desire to earn personal value or self esteem— to merit continued life, as if there were a universal moral code favoring “goodness”. The “bad self” or shadow threatens us because of a primitive belief that such inferior or “evil” qualities invite divine or cosmic retaliation and a shortened life span. The key point here is that in order to insure our continuity, we war against the shadow in an attempt to rid ourselves of it by projecting it onto others.
    
We spend a lifetime creating a twofold camouflage: the persona and the creation of enemies. Enemies serve as scapegoats, who we imagine are contaged with qualities that are opposite or inferior to ours or that clash with our cherished beliefs. This psychological jihad can be found in the polarized categories of Proud boys versus Antifa, progressives versus Republicans, white Americans versus black and brown people. Such divisions are not inherently problematic if they reflect a diversity of opinions, perspectives, preferences, or simply distinguish among various races and creeds. They become pernicious when they’re an effort to purify ourselves by relocating our own negative qualities in others, and then quarantining such individuals or groups, and at worst, persecuting them. 

                                               The Need for a Scapegoat

We avoid recognition of our own inferior, disowned, wounded self by projecting our negativities onto others, in a blind effort to purify ourselves of any quality that would threaten our continued existence. Our bloody human history is replete with examples of our efforts to deny the collective shadow by finding evidence of its existence everywhere but in ourselves. This is the basis of racism, sexism, religious persecution, genocide and enemy making in general. Governments have been using the fear of the other to keep us divided by scapegoating various classes of individuals: feminists, liberals, hippies, Black men, Mexicans and Asians— those who are distinguishable from us “real Americans”.

Because we know that we are mortal, the thing that we want most to deny is mortality. Embedded within the human psyche is the wish to live forever and to avoid death, and the historical way to do this has been to seek a sacrificial scapegoat that is offered in place of oneself. The ancient law of our species has been to offer up a sacrifice to appease cosmic powers, thus ensuring a good harvest and the longevity of the tribe. What is camouflaged is that this sacrificial act is a symbolic killing of the collective shadow.

The phenomenon of group or racial superiority has its origin in our effort to dissociate ourselves from any sense of inferiority. To believe that your group is pure and good, makes it eligible for the good life, where you will live in a land of milk and honey. But others, like the Asians or people of color are the real enemies, who are contaminating your group’s purity. The phenomenon of scapegoating gives you or your clan or tribe a mandate to launch a campaign to make the world “pure” once again.

We are driven to fabricate the “other”, the enemy, the adversary to bear the burden of our denied self hatred. Enemy-making does serve a perverse purpose. It offers the illusion that we will not have to face our own shadow if we destroy or quarantine those who symbolize those parts of ourselves that we most deny. 
   
Beyond the personal shadow is a universal shadow— the inevitability of disease, decay, and death caused by nature itself. When a volcanic eruption, a tsunami, or an earthquake takes the lives of tens of thousands in a terrifying moment, we’re left with unanswerable existential questions about nature's seeming indifference, and the undeserved suffering and death of innocent men, women, and children. To make peace with these issues means that we must contend with the shadow of God or the shadow of Life. For most people this challenge is confounding and overwhelming. It is far easier to project their doubts, confusion, and feelings of powerlessness onto the devil and his minions— dividing life between the forces of good and the legions of evil. 

                                                     The Dark Treasury

The challenge at this time in our history is whether we have the courage to recognize that the persona we have created to earn membership and good standing in our culture or subgroup— is only half the story. The difficult question that lingers is whether or not we could love ourselves if we embraced our own shadow. The shadow in itself is not evil, but is the dark treasury that contains both our neuroses and our undeveloped gifts, and holds the potential to complete us. When we extend understanding and compassion to those dark parts of ourselves that we've judged as unacceptable, our shadow can heal the rupture with our depths, so that we can feel whole once again.

As a society, we must begin to demythologize the “other”, the enemy, and begin acknowledging and communicating with our own shadow. Our self-esteem is groomed through openness to and deep appreciation of our inner world, but also an openness to life’s ambiguity, complexity, and uncertainty.  Personal value is discovered in the delight and anguish of love, in the suffering of loss, in the sublime beauty of nature, in passionate involvement with a project, but also in the poignant pain of unrealized dreams, in questions that remain unanswered, and in the frustration of not being able to create the perfect life or the perfect society. This requires trust in life, trust in nature, and trust in ourselves— and in being willing to discover the light in darkness and to recognize the darkness as our own. The life of our species depends upon it.

                                         The Road Not Taken 
                               Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 
                               And sorry I could not travel both 
                               And be one traveler, long I stood 
                               And looked down one as far as I could 
                               To where it bent in the undergrowth; 
                               Then took the other... 
                                I shall be telling this with a sigh 
                               Somewhere ages and ages hence: 
                               Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— 
                               I took the one less traveled by, 
                               And that has made all the difference. 
                                                          by Robert Frost

We are driven to be ourselves and this is the creative human task. To that end, we mold the raw substance of our life to create an identity so that we can be at home in the world and comfortable in our own skin. We establish livelihood, raise children and assume responsibility for a family, nourish our intimate relationships, and cultivate a sense of community with like- minded friends. However, the very things that provide us with this sense of home, also make a claim upon us. They reinforce our idea of ourselves and exert a palpable expectation that we don’t stray too far from how they see us. ​

Creating a sense of “home” is necessary, but our life is immeasurably deepened to the extent that we are willing to explore what lies beyond it. The problem is that once having established this sense of home, we’re not so eager to step beyond its boundaries when it challenges our familiar idea of ourselves. 

Yet, our dreams and fantasies betray us. The “roads not taken” speak to our unrealized dreams and desires that still live in the subterranean basement or our mind and heart. The stories or movies that deeply touch us and provoke an unexpected rush of feelings, reveal aspects of ourselves that whisper, “This could be exciting to explore.” These roads expose our unclaimed desires that have gone underground, but which are psychologically active in our imagination. What are your deepest wishes right now? What truly calls you at this time in your life? Does such a question get your heart to beat a little faster, creating a mixture excitement and apprehension? Or do you dismiss these images or visions as just fantasy and as unrealistic, or do they linger in your interior where they still pulse with life and press for satisfaction? 

Given the multiple environmental, political and social catastrophes that we’re besieged by, our life could feel tentative and somewhat incoherent, as though we're just hanging on, waiting impatiently for some semblance of normality to return. At a time when the survival of both ourselves and our loved ones is foremost in our minds, dreams and fantasies could feel indulgent or escapist. When we’re in crisis, we tend to give priority to concerns about safety and security and the need for order and control. 

Yet, we may be at a crossroads. We could be inhibiting ourselves by being overly reasonable, anxiously safeguarding what we already have. Even now, at this time of Covid, we could shine a light into the unexplored areas of our life by daring to imagine what’s possible. The problem is that we may not know how to use our imagination in order to animate the forces and energies within our psyche to seduce them to speak to us. 

The human heart has a logic of its own which is often at variance with what is practical or profitable. The spiritual path challenges us to drop into our depths, regardless of our external circumstances, and to live imaginatively. But this does not suggest simply manipulating our imagination to gratify the more surface wishes of happiness and success. Imagination inspires us to live close to the heart, where we might explore the visionary dimensions of ourselves and the world. It’s as if you dropped down into the deepest place within yourself, and regarded your life situation from there. You allow images, intuitions, and gut feelings take shape as if they had complete legitimacy. With fresh eyes, you might suddenly “see” that you do have the time and energy to take online dance lessons or tai chi, start painting, learn a foreign language, begin writing that novel, drive to a nearby state park to walk a trail with a friend, or even go back to school. 

You might take a risk and sell your current business or perhaps start a new one, or begin preparing for a long awaited trip to Italy or Spain, when travel restrictions are lifted. Perhaps you commit yourself to a therapeutic process to genuinely work through an issue that has dogged you for a lifetime, or begin exploring a spiritual path that speaks to you. By daring to take roads less traveled, we cross the rigid boundaries that have kept us in check for decades. These might be the roads that we've postponed taking, having told ourselves that we will return to them when everything returns to normal. But the world, as we once knew it, might not return to our idea of normal. 

At the same time, not every road should be taken, especially if it will bring harm or unnecessary complication to ourselves and others. The roads not yet traveled should not always be taken literally. Often they are metaphoric, suggesting unfulfilled needs and wishes that appear to us in forms that might camouflage their real meaning. But if we keep company with them, they can drop us down to our roots where they reveal what's been left out, excluded from our busy lives—the very qualities we need to reclaim in order to experience a greater sense of wholeness. 

The roads not taken have the power to animate the dormant side of ourselves that may hold a key to our larger identity. To open to these dimensions puts us face to face with the unfamiliar side of ourselves—to those experiences that are not always rational or reasonable, or that can be neatly categorized or explained away. They can suggest emotional terrain we've been reluctant to traverse because of our need for control and order, especially when so much of the world feels out of control and chaotic. 

For instance, if we gave a voice to the heaviness we feel weighing down on our chest, it might reveal our need to give in to sadness and grief, recognizing that such feelings are really about how much we care for the people in our life, and our wish to share the best of ourselves with them. Our grief could be about the ongoing threat to our creaturely need for safety, security, and normalcy— that we now realize can be abruptly taken away. 

The roads not taken may invite us into one of our relationships that needs a deeper, more nuanced conversation. The tightness in our belly might speak to a stuck place that's keeping us and a good friend at a distance from each other. In spite of our silent grudge, we dare to forgive our friend for his unintended failure to mirror us, to see us as we'd like to be seen. The road not taken could be when we muster the courage to drop our defensive armor and share our vulnerability with an adult daughter, or when we dissolve our negative judgments of our partner when her shadow side is exposed, revealing dark qualities that threaten us. Although it goes against the grain, instead of withdrawing our love and our presence, we remain steady, and reaffirm our commitment to the relationship.
 
The road not taken could be our willingness to let it “fall apart," to allow ourselves to feel just how exhausted we are of struggling to hold it all together during these difficult times. We simply stop what we're doing, right now, and allow ourselves to weep, as we stretch out into a thoughtless space of inertia, for as long as we need to restore ourselves. This does not mean that we have given up on life, but rather that we permit our weakness, weariness, and vulnerability to have their voice. 
​
By asking ourselves, “What calls me now, or what does my soul want me to experience now, at this very moment?”—we drop our attention to our core. It is from this place of deep feeling that we can bring what has been excluded or ignored onto our spiritual path, and reignite the fire in our belly. When we dare to walk the roads not taken, they open us to experiences, not for the sake of overcoming life's struggles, but to know ourselves fully. And this is what makes all the difference.

                                            The Second Coming
                                Turning and turning in the widening gyre
                                The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
                                Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
                                Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
                                The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
                                The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
                                The best lack all conviction, while the worst
                                Are full of passionate intensity….
                                                               William Butler Yeats

This well known poem by Yeats is remarkably prescient, as we are experiencing a global pandemic, disastrous climate disruption, the extinction of countless species, extreme political polarization and conflict, a rupture in our social networks and for many, the loss of their livelihood. Things have indeed fallen apart. Life for many of us no longer conveys a coherent or meaningful picture—but only a fragmented image of our former life. At such an ambiguous and uncertain time, it's easy to get derailed and succumb to feelings of powerlessness and confusion, depression and anxiety. Or we grew increasingly numb, feeling overwhelmed by contradictory information from our politicians and the media. ​

We’re often not aware of the sadness and grief we carry because of our feelings of estrangement from the life we formerly knew. We seem to be searching for a lost connection, wanting to return to that unmistakable sense of home and the experience of belonging to the world we remember. Yet, the days grow longer, the afternoon sun feels increasingly warm, as spring has infallibly arrived. There are things that we can count on. 

In the Buddhist tradition there is a deceptively simple way to come back home to ourselves. Through the alternating gestures of holding on and letting go we can discover a self-directive principle at our core. When we let go of our self-doubt, preoccupations, and hesitation we might discover a source of uplifted energy that's already there, in spite of the multiple stressors that confront us. Holding on is knowing how to creatively handle this energy, how to cultivate it, so that we can experience joy and aliveness. 
    
The cycles of breathing whisper the message that if we want a fresh breath, we must surrender the breath that we’re presently holding. Such sacrifice echoes a natural law which has an edge to it, especially when we have to let go of someone because our respective journeys are taking us in different directions.
    
Bringing awareness to our breathing aligns us with the natural rhythm of beginnings and endings. The ordinary cycles of breathing are modeling for us that we can’t hold onto the nearest and dearest people in our life—not to spouses, children, parents, nor to the experiences that are most exquisite. They’re passing, and so are we, moving irresistibly in the stream of time. At the same time, breathing is a doorway leading what which transcends us. With each breath, we draw from a vast atmosphere that connects us to what is not us. 
      
The continuous cycles of breath remind us that something larger than us holds all of it. There’s a boundless energetic pattern, an interconnected web within which life occurs, one that maintains and sustains us. We are being breathed by the totality of life which lives through us, transforming us into mysterious beings much larger than our personalities and our personal history. 

The practice of letting go and holding on, however, each have polar opposite expressions. One expression puts us in touch with a self-directive principle or what we might experience as inner guidance, while the other goes against it and puts us at odds with ourselves and others.
                                                           Letting Go 
 
On the ground level of everyday life, we practice by letting go of what has served its usefulness and no longer provides nourishment for either ourselves or for those with whom we’re involved. We gently release our grip, letting go, letting out—-and letting be. We gracefully release what we’ve been holding onto and what has its hold on us, when it sabotages or compromises our spiritual path. We let go of our stale beliefs, assumptions, and expectations when they are out of sync with our current situation. This often evokes feelings of loss and sadness, and can precipitate a period of grieving for who or what we are parting company with. 
  
Letting go returns us to the space of openness, where out of emptiness, something new can emerge. We let go of the passing moment so that we can open to this immediately refreshing moment, which is all we really ever have. As we release our hold on what we are attached to, a door of possibility opens, inviting us to step through.
    
On the other hand, letting go could be tone deaf, a denial of deep listening to what's best for us. It could be an expression of carelessly letting it all hang out, letting go of any sense of restraint, dropping our decorum or sense of propriety. This would amount to dramatizing or acting out our grievances, disappointments, and regrets without concern about their impact on others. We just couldn't be bothered. Letting go in this case would be giving up on caring and concern for others, or ourselves, or at worst, giving up on life itself. 

                                                            Holding On   
     
The gesture of holding on could be an expression of holding someone or something close to our heart, honoring and cherishing who and what we value. To hold another with affection is to express our deep sense of caring and compassion, the very thing that makes us truly human. We cultivate what is true, good, and beautiful, the loving relationships we do have, and the qualities necessary for them to deepen—generosity, humor, patience, and wise mind.
  
In its negative aspect, holding on could be an expression of resistance and stubbornness, a refusal to give an inch. It could be a refusal to acknowledge the validity of perspectives different from our own.  Such stubbornness is when we insist that our point of view is the right one, and often amounts to an unwillingness to negotiate or compromise with others to get through an impasse. Alternatively, holding on could reflect our insecurity, as we cling to who or what we've become dependent upon, fearful to let go into new territory— the unknown.

                                                          Integration

As we mature in the dual practice of letting go and holding on we discover that an uplifting energy is always available to us, regardless of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Letting go is the ongoing willingness to drop whatever we're holding and to open to what's here, now. This keeps us inquisitive and sharp. Holding on is the practice of cultivating and nurturing what is fundamentally good,  which provides stability and self-assuredness. Consequently, our feathers do not get so easily ruffled by chaotic circumstances. We’re able to skillfully ride the energy of situations through this dual practice, so that we can embrace who and what we love, while letting go lightly, again and again.
    
​We hold on to the faith that our life has purpose, and we cultivate our aspiration for what is still possible for us. We let go by not losing heart even when we fail, we don't give up hope even when we meet with loss, and we don't remain stuck in despair even when we've lost someone precious. Instead we hold on in the sense of nurturing our capacity to give birth to new life out of the ashes of loss and failure. Through the gesture of continual openness, we embrace what is here, now, cherishing the moment, even when we don't know what lies ahead. We foster the faith that the good draws the good to itself.

Meditation involves mindful attention to what arises in our experience. But it also helps us cultivate panoramic awareness that sharpens our ability to make connections and see parallels that were hiding in plain sight.
​
Consider the following description of the prenatal passage: initially, the maturing embryo floats effortlessly within the maternal amniotic sac, safe and secure within its mother’s womb. By the close of the third trimester, as the fetus is ending its intrauterine life, the uterus begins to violently contract, launching the fetus’ painful process of separation from its home. Through a series of spasmodic contractions, it is ejected through the constricted passageway of the birth canal, and a dramatic life-and-death struggle ensues. This is followed by the shocking miracle of physical birth, the severing of the umbilical cord, and the first gasp of air—initiating the infant into a realm of unimaginable possibilities.

If we regard this scenario intuitively, or with panoramic awareness, we might notice that there’s an uncanny parallel between the entire birth process and that of giving birth to something truly new. First, there’s a period of incubation in response to a challenge, where we gestate divergent ideas and perspectives. Then we struggle with obstacles and limitations, as we try to resolve a problem or make our way through a stuck place. Finally, we reach a critical mass where a breakthrough occurs, and we birth something refreshingly novel. 

Could we be undergoing a parallel process of being ejected from the comfort and predictability of our normal everyday world—as we struggle with a loss of hope, alienation and meaninglessness—to make way for the breakthrough of an emerging paradigm? With the COVID global pandemic and climate disruption, the breakdown of political, economic, social, and cultural structures, there seems to be a widespread feeling of loss, grief, and disorientation, as we anticipate the end of our familiar world. But could this be a necessary initiation into a realm of unexpected possibilities, signaling our culture’s next evolutionary leap?
                                                           Initiation

An initiation marks the passage from one state to another, optimally, to a more evolved level of awareness or to an expanded set of capacities and skills. An initiation upsets the status quo, and breaks through a stalemate or impasse by investing an individual or a society with a new worldview. It usually involves a change in role or function, a more expansive self image, and a narrative that ties the fragmented and contradictory pieces of the world into a coherent form, so that we can make sense  of it all.
    
Could our current global situation be a manifestation of a stale paradigm that has exhausted its usefulness and is now creating oppressive conditions and enormous suffering? Author Rick Tarnas states that a paradigm is born when the current one is experienced as constricting and limiting, creating problems that don't admit of solutions. This leads to a crisis when a new paradigm begins to emerge from the ashes of the prevailing one. It breaks through at a timely moment in a culture’s evolution, addressing and eventually resolving what the previous paradigm could not.

                                                     Promethean Rebel

The multiple problems confronting us right now are symptoms of a worldview with an underlying set of assumptions that are driving us towards a precipice. Our Western culture has been epitomized by the masculine hero, who, in his quest for independence and freedom, has separated himself from the surrounding natural environment. Historically, in our evolution as a species, this was a necessary development. The masculine Promethean rebel severed our umbilical tie to our unconscious embeddedness within nature to give birth to the self-determining individual. Although necessary as an evolutionary step for our species, the over emphasis of the masculine principle developed into a separation of body from mind, nature from spirit, and men from women. This development lies at the root of our Western culture, and has significantly contributed to the problematic conditions in which we find ourselves. (The masculine and feminine principles are not necessarily gender based, but exist in both men and women.The masculine principle is the capacity for agency or self-direction, while the female principle is the complementary capacity for communion, connection, and nurturance.)

​Our mechanized view of the human body with our focus on image rather than depth of feeling, the belief that we should control our spontaneous feelings and dominate whatever is naturally wild and untamed, and our exploitation of nature as a natural resource for economic gain, all have blinded us from recognizing our interdependence with the surrounding natural world, and with all other life forms.
                    
                                                  Dominator Culture

Cultural anthropologist, Riane Eisler, writes about our historical inheritance of a “dominator” cultural model which distorts our natural yearning for connection, intimacy, and love.  She states that historically earlier “partnership” oriented societies did not celebrate the power to dominate, but rather the power to nurture. Such partnership societies did not make a distinction between nature and spirituality, or between the sacred and everyday life. Based on the dominator model of social organization, men felt entitled to assume domination over the chaotic powers of the nature, as well as the body of others. We’ve inherited patterns of domination and submission in relationships between parents and children, political leaders and citizens, and between men and women.  Culturally this is reflected in the association of masculinity with male aggression, sexual pleasure with domination, and with the suppression of the feminine feelings of caring, compassion and tenderness. 

The time is right for a paradigm shift. Patriarchal society champions economic rewards, political power and control in an arena of fierce competition, rather than cultivating cooperation and collaboration. The social structure of the hierarchy typifies this phenomenon, with men occupying the upper echelons of the military, our politics, and corporate multinational companies. Author Fritjof Capra states that the network, which is eco or earth-centered, honors all non-human life, and is the social structure that represents the newly emerging paradigm. From this perspective, we recognize that all living beings are bound together in a network of interdependent, mutually supportive relationships. 

                                                   Sacred Marriage
​
Signs of this new paradigm are evidenced by the increasing awareness of the existential threat of climate breakdown, the devastation of our planet’s life support systems, and by a growing intolerance of political and corporate policies of domination and exploitation of the environment. With the growing awareness of nature’s intelligence and its self-organizing, self-correcting capacities, we are witnessing a gradual shift away from the exploitation of nature to one of sustainability, using nature’s own design principles to reimagine the basis of a new civilization. With this alternative perspective, there's a new appreciation of feminine perspectives of the divine.
 
​We are experiencing what appears to be the labor pains of a new paradigm as it struggles to take root in our culture’s soil. This emerging paradigm is challenging us to support the conditions necessary for a sacred marriage between our masculine and feminine principles. Such an integration suggests a deepening intimacy with ourselves, a wiser and more caring relationship with the natural environment, the celebration of diversity between cultures, and the nurturance of all humans as part of a shared single planetary family. The fruition of this sacred marriage would potentially be to recover our connection with our intrinsic wholeness, with a life-affirming ethics, and ultimately with the mystery of life, which includes both creation and destruction.

My intention in writing these blogs is to suggest alternative ways of looking at where we find ourselves when our world is going through such a momentous transition. Our old life is being stripped away and we’re being initiated into a strange new world. This is a time of extraordinary losses, and sorrow and grief keep company with us. Like the AIDS virus that paired the most pleasurable erotic experience with death, now it is our natural yearning to connect with loved ones that is associated with possible contagion, debilitating illness and death. ​

We live in an unnatural atmosphere of potential threat. This global pandemic intersects with a score of other crises—ecological, political, economic, ethical, and the threat of nuclear war. Equally pernicious is the Babel of disinformation being spewed from cable networks and online websites. We live in an era when our country is in the precarious situation of not being able to agree on a common set of facts, when people feel empowered to have their own alternative “facts”. We seem to be making a passage through a kind of underworld, and we’re being challenged to muster both courage and compassion during this difficult time.

As with the other converging crises, COVID is more than an external threat. Its most lethal manifestation is its mutation within us, transforming our state of mind into one of fear, worry and inhibition. Many of us seem to alternate between denial and despair, as we either lose ourselves in the distracting business of everyday life, or we feel increasing threat and varying degrees of hopelessness. And yet in view of this global pandemic that is radically changing the way we live our lives, hope springs eternal, as many of us manage to get through another week, and find ways to appreciate the loving relationships we do have, and do the things that we can do. Hope and hopelessness weave in and out of our lives. 

Hopelessness has many faces, and it’s important to name them, to call them out from invisibility into the light of awareness. It can spring from the false belief that we must go at it alone and not depend on anyone or anything. Hopelessness is often experienced as the existential sense of no exit, impossibility, endless repetition, being trapped by our circumstances. The forces of life feel too enormous and too powerful to be influenced or moved. The most dreadful aspect of hopelessness is the feeling of having lost the thread that connects the chapters of our life, that would give us the reassuring feeling of our life's continuity and coherence. It could suddenly feel as if we've become rudderless, having fallen off the edge of our known world.  Hopelessness can lead to the death of wishing, when we can no longer imagine beyond the limits of where we are presently stuck. We may have stopped feeling that our life is an evolving life journey, and so we stand still.

On the other hand, genuine hope springs from the deepest place within us as we yearn to feel whole once again. It is the heartfelt desire to connect with our own depths, our longing for meaning, to be part of something larger than the habitual routines that stitch together the events of our daily life. This kind of hope could feel as if something beyond our everyday comings and goings wishes to make itself known through us. 

As humans, we have an inner sense that we’re held by something larger than us. When our mind, body, and heart are synchronized, when all of us is there at once, a sense of presence dawns. This energized atmosphere is often the occasion of sudden shifts in perception or a serendipitous turn of events that we weren't counting on. If we’re willing to be intimate with our life, gifts might spontaneously appear where we’d least expect to find them—a patron passing us in the market flashes an admiring smile at us that brightens the day and dispels our preoccupation; a pause in the rain invites us to step outdoors to notice a rosebush bedazzled with translucent raindrops, while the fragrance of the damp earth draws us downwards to our organic roots, returning us to our animal body.     

The virtue of mature hope is the enduring trust that Life itself lives through us, rather than feeling as though we are struggling organisms in a Darwinian jungle trying to grab whatever happiness we can get hold of before we’re snuffed out. The virtue of hope is the realization that we're not just pushed from behind by our social conditioning, or shaped by external circumstances, but that we're also pulled forward by who we are yet to become— like the potential oak exerting it's magnetic pull on the chestnut. This is the benevolent pull of our Buddha or awakened nature that inspires us to trust in our life as an evolutionary journey, where we find ourselves genuinely curious about what is unfolding for us right now.   

The secret of mature hope is found in the intimate and meaningful connection between ourselves and the life situation in which we find ourselves. My eyes and the rosebush before me, meet through the medium of light—and the experience of vision magically emerges. In Buddhism this is referred to as auspicious coincidence. The world has fashioned us so that we and the natural world actually meet, so that we can integrate the swirling chaos of sight and sound, smell and taste, as well as our feelings, and make sense of it all. Eyes, ears, tongue, nose and our skin encapsulated bodies are “sympathetically” shaped by the natural world, allowing our human life to unfold through continuous experience.

In spite of our challenging circumstances, we could still live life by being willing to enter the moment wherever we find ourselves by being willing to come in close. We don't have to endure or try to escape unpleasant occasions, but it may be good enough to be in them, to appreciate being here, wherever we happen to be at any point in our day.

The secret passage through COVID is discovered in our willingness to experience hopelessness, doubt, despair, grief, anxiety, confusion and all the rest of our shadowy feelings. We don't have to resist what's already here. Our compassionate and creative handling of these “dark” states transforms them by allowing them psychic space so that they may express themselves. Although they are a part of us, they do not have to contaminate our capacity for genuine hope as long as we give them a voice. 
                        The Guest House
                This being human is a guest house.
                 Every morning a new arrival.
                 A joy, a depression, a meanness,
                 some momentary awareness comes
                 As an unexpected visitor.
                 Welcome and entertain them all!
                 Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
                 who violently sweep your house
                 empty of its furniture,
                 still treat each guest honorably.
                 He may be clearing you out
                 for some new delight.
                 The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
                 meet them at the door laughing,
                 and invite them in.
                 Be grateful for whoever comes,
                 because each has been sent
                 as a guide from beyond.
                                   Rumi

Hopelessness, doubt, grief and despair have their own story to tell and their own reasons for coming into being. But to hear their story we must be willing to drop our defenses and make time to truly listen. By giving these darker emotions our attention and dialoguing with them, we metabolize their problematic aspect, so that we tread lighter on our path.

​Genuine hope grows when we bring the power of our trusting presence to our world. That very trust evokes the quality of presence from the world, which is its sacred or enchanted aspect. Consequently, we’re able to wait patiently through difficult circumstances because we realize that we’re not alone, but in intimate relationship with that which is beyond words. During this COVID era we are being challenged to open to our own light, trusting that the basic goodness of our undefended heart is already connected to the primordial goodness of the world.
                         
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                            Wild Geese             
             You do not have to be good.
             You do not have to walk on your knees
             For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
             You only have to let the animal of your body
             Love what it loves.
             Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
             Meanwhile the world goes on.
             Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
             Are moving across the landscapes,
             Over the prairies and the deep trees,
             The mountains and the rivers.
             Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
             Are heading home again
             Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, 
             The world offers itself to your imagination,
             Calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting,
             Over and over announcing your place
             In the family of things.
                                                  By Mary Oliver        ​

The further reaches of the Buddhist path is called tantra. Buddhist tantra proclaims that wherever we find ourselves, no matter what the circumstances, we don't have to make an effort to escape the apparent limitations of our immediate situation. Truth, goodness, or beauty can be found in the living energy of life, on the street level of worldly desires, conflicts and turbulent emotions. A luminous energy sparkles through everyday experiences to reveal that there's no corner of life that doesn't radiate Buddha essence.

Yet, in this COVID era our hopes and dreams collide with the sobering reality of our actual lives. We’re continually reminded of our vulnerability, as our feelings of safety and security may be challenged with every bodily symptom, every change of condition or capacity. We may find ourselves reevaluating our most intimate relationships with our spouses and our friends, as well as our commitments to various projects, and question whether our work (if we're fortunate to have a job) is meaningful or alienating.  

Since COVID punctuated our busy lives, there might be an unnameable sense of incompleteness or dissatisfaction, an irritating unrest or edge to our daily existence. We may have lost the sense of a meaningful destination, a purpose-driven life, as we find ourselves just getting through another week. It's not uncommon to experience a subtle shift in our interior world, a change in personal atmosphere, as we wonder whether our “best days” have gone by. Perhaps we’ve become overly self-preoccupied, feeling alienated from our community of friends. We might gradually begin to feel misunderstood by our dearest friends and relatives, gripped by the realization that we’re no longer looking forward to anything. 
    
It can sometimes feel that life has betrayed us, as we struggle with sorrow and despair and suffer the many disappointments that are inevitable during this time. The effect of this global pandemic has caused dramatic changes in our lives, changes that we’re yet to fully understand. Somewhere along the way, our daily life could feel like a burden, as we silently wonder, "Is this all there is?” or “When will it all end?” We might find ourselves at a loss for how to go forward, other than repeating what we did yesterday. This sense of burden is a wound and it can make our everyday life feel like a trial by fire.

                                         The need for a new story     
                     
In wounding, our psyche or soul is opened up and we are dropped into our depths. If we can envision our lives as an evolving journey, then stagnation, ambivalence, and dissatisfaction may be a wake up call. We are being provoked to open to the largest possible conversation we can have with our life. What does this mean?

Crisis and hardship can be a profound catalyst that rivets our attention so that we take notice of what we’ve overlooked or ignored. For instance, if you made the time to verbalize what it's like to feel like a stranger in a strange land, what would you say? When what you were counting on no longer seems possible, could you imagine how that might actually serve you? When you feel that social isolation has put you at your edge, could this be a fork in the road, inviting you to step into unfamiliar territory? Such unfamiliar passageways are our unlived life, and they want us to participate. But to meet the life that awaits us, it’s necessary to wade through uncharted waters. Even though we can’t see what lies ahead, paradoxically, it’s our wounds that guide us for how to step deeper into our lives, while moving forward on our spiritual path. This is the invitation to the larger story. Discovering the voice to speak your story can mean the difference between a life of ambivalence and stagnation, and one of endless exploration and creative expression.
    
Our culture has not acknowledged the need for meaningful rites of passage, that would honor the unfolding of our lives as we transition through the many stages of our human life cycle. We do have rites of passage in the form of baptism, bar mitzvah, graduations from public school and university, ceremonies for marriage, the birth of children, retirements and memorialization at funerals. But the birthing of a new story that heralds a change of heart remains an ignored and overlooked passage.
    
Telling your story may be one such rite of passage that honors the unique and particular way that life has incarnated through you. Birthing a new story can be the sacred portal through which you’re challenged by the life you’ve yet to live, and opened to dimensions of experience you’ve denied or ignored. These forgotten or denied possibilities of experience hold the key to our return to feeling whole once again. They represent the “roads not taken” that can re-spark our connection with the lost depths of our soul. This present moment in our lives is sacred because as Mary Oliver says, “The world offers itself to your imagination”. It is what we are given to shape and refine into a unique expression of how our life speaks through us.
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                                      “How do I begin telling my story?”

From the silence and stillness of the meditative state of mind, we can take something quite ordinary and explore that thing from multiple perspectives, seeing, feeling, and sensing it from new angles, so that we get to know that thing like never before. When we bring all of us into our writing, we’re informed by a deeper kind of knowing than intellectual.    
     
When we write from the deep place that a meditative state of mind invites us into, we touch something that may be larger than our autobiographical self. Perhaps here, the world speaks it's meaning through us, and realizes itself from within our mind and heart, especially when we bring to our writing—our intuition and intellect, our imagination and instincts, and our feelings and sensations. This is the magical juncture where the hidden side of life reveals it's secrets.

                                                         january 2021
                                                    by Ira Rechtshaffer

​According to the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus stated, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” What is hidden within us needs to be revealed if we are going to live authentic lives.  

After morning meditation practice, it has been my habit for years to write about what feels alive to me. The following is a series of reflections that have been growing within me that I'd like to share with you.                                     
                         
First there is nothing, just open space, the blank canvas, the bare sheet of paper, the enchanting sound of silence—and then the wet brush touches the canvas, the first letter punctuates the blank
sheet of paper, the first musical note resonates, radiating out into the surrounding space. It all begins with the first dot, syllable or sound in the virgin space of openness. 

Everything from the building of the great pyramids, the composition of Beethoven’s symphonies, or the writing of The Alexandria Quartet—is a statement that, “I was here and I mattered”. Such creations are a denial of our seeming cosmic insignificance, as if to say that we are more than a flash of light between two forgetful worlds of darkness. It is an existential statement that we were called by life to play a part, and that we had a place in the immense design of things. Although we may not be famous, nor endowed with exceptional qualities, or have improved the world in any dramatic way, nevertheless, the world would not be what it is without us.
    
The world’s great myths were given expression by our ancient ancestors who sat around campfires, singing or telling or dancing the stories of the tribe or clan. To “story” one's life is to be human. It is to shape our struggles and sacrifices, loves and losses, heartbreak and renewed hope, crystallizing the human drama into a coherent and meaningful form. To tell our story joins us with others, who have also struggled and rejoiced, and yearned for better days. Our personal narrative enriches and deepens the collective human story, and without intending to do so, your story might articulate others’ unfinished or unexplored narratives— the places they couldn't or wouldn't go. Something about what you've expressed resonates so deeply with their experience, but they simply didn't have the words, until you uttered them.
    
There's much more to the moment than we realize. Many of our experiences were never fully understood at the time, and got buried in half-digested form. We may have been too young to comprehend the implications of our experiences, or we may have felt pressured or coerced by others to move on with our lives before we were ready to do so. Or perhaps we were frightened to look too deeply for fear of discovering painful truths about ourselves or our loved ones. Such experiences need to eventually be digested to nourish our soul, and fill out the potential fullness of the human being that we are.
           
Telling your story could begin right now, as you are. We are living through very dramatic times. Between the COVID global pandemic and the aborted attempt at insurrection of our government—it’s easy to feel bewildered, overwhelmed, and powerless. We might feel disheartened that we have nothing new to say, and that the outer events of politics and those involving our personal history are inflexible “facts” that have already happened, and that there's nothing more to do, but accept them as we remember them.
    
The power of meditation is that it cuts through our free-associative thinking and stale stories, opening us up to the deeper dimensions of our mind and heart. Here, we can experience a more spacious, peaceful, and sensitive state of being. This openness is not merely silent and still, but is fertile with potential and is immensely hospitable, inviting us to continually give birth to form. Our personal narrative might emerge from here, as if a “story” were incarnating through the alternating rhythms of our sensations, feelings, and bodily energies.
    
Yet, our “truth” could become distorted by our past associations and fixed beliefs. There is a necessary back-and-forth dance between the still point of meditation and it's varied expressions.  Meditation cuts through our obsessive thinking, but the complementary side to this is the intuitive, poetic, and imaginative use of words to unpack our unique experience of our life by “storying” it. Here we’re challenged to think, feel, reflect, and revision our life by questioning everything that we think we know.

Life has touched us, opened us up, broken our heart, dashed our hopes, but also infused us with joy and lifted our spirits. Perhaps we have glossed over the unfolding moments of our passing days, failing to notice details that cried out to catch our attention, unaware of how precious they were.  But the good news is that we can revisit many past occasions of our life to have a second look. And we can envision a life that inspires us to face forward and step into a new beginning with the best version of ourselves.

Many of us hold the events of our life as “facts”, i.e. “The divorce was a nightmare”; “I can't forgive myself for not preventing our son from becoming an addict”; or “I thought I knew what love was”. When we move into the imaginal space of our non-rational, deep mind, we can open up and revisit the so-called facts of our life, to reveal that they're not as solid and fixed as we thought. We may discover that there are innumerable ways we can feel into them, understand them, recognize how we participated in them, and sense how they continue to shape us to this day. We can think the world with our mind, feel the world with our heart, or intuit the world with our soul or deep psyche.
    
Through intuition and imagination, qualities that meditation cultivates, we can transform the ordinary events and happenings of everyday life, so that they might embody a deeper, richer and truer story, lending meaning and value to our lives. We can use the power of our imagination not simply to invent a better story, but rather as Martin Buber suggested, “To imagine the real.”
    
This human capacity to transform the “facts” of our life into a rich tapestry of new perspectives, feelings, sensations, textures, and unanticipated associations, reveals that our human life defies definition. There is something awe-inspiring about our stories, visions and dreams, which are inexhaustible in their potential expressions.  They not only record what has happened to us, what we have done or failed to do, but they, in turn, shape us and the world which we inhabit. We are like gods and goddesses in our power to give birth to new worlds of experience. The mystery is that there is no final story, but only the one we’re daring to discover now.

Change can insinuate itself in our lives ever so slightly until one day it feels as if the entire atmosphere has changed, causing us to question how this happened. We didn't notice the subtle shifts taking place beneath the distracting business of everyday life. These somewhat disorienting moments are also precious because, like a cosmic slap in the face, they wake us up and force us to recognize that we might have been hiding from ourselves. When life has reshuffled our cards without having consulted us, we have to make our way through feeings of "being at a loss”. But getting what we weren't expecting can initiate a process of inquisitiveness, so that we get to see who and what we’ve been holding onto to conceal life’s unpredictable shadowy side.

 After years of one kind of meditation or another, and even after years of psychotherapy, we’re not immune from feeling distressed by life's seemingly whimsical turns. A spouse becomes seriously ill and needs hospitalization; one of our children becomes addicted to drugs and refuses our intervention; a teenage daughter has become emotionally inaccessible, and we’re at a loss for how to bridge the gap. We don't know how or when it happened, but like the fog creeping in, little by little, she gradually became remote and unrecognizable to us. Such events provoke us to question how we might have contributed to such painful outcomes.

Disappointment is not a very sexy topic. Yet, it’s unavoidable both in ordinary life and on a spiritual path. It could mean not achieving your goals or objectives, not being able to either magnetize or maintain a loving relationship, feeling defeated for not living up to your standards or ethical principles, or feeling helpless to protect your loved ones from danger. In a more general sense, it's the failure to get what you want, or to avoid getting what you don't want. We can’t always insulate ourselves from life’s uncertain twists and turns, and from time to time, even the best of us find ourselves in free fall.

Few people begin or persist on a genuine spiritual path without experiencing a period of disappointment that doesn't admit of a remedy. If we're going to engage the spiritual process then we mustn't deny or rationalize such painful experiences. Our life may have brought us to the edge of our known world to invite to step into uncharted territory. That ambiguous territory could also reveal that we’re afraid to surrender to love or to discover what we’re truly passionate about because then we would have to put ourselves on the line and risk failing. As a result of not fully participating, we’re left with a formless malaise.

There are many ways in which the feeling of disappointment creeps into our lives. Sometimes the bottom falls out abruptly and we're in the midst of a crisis. We might wake up one morning to realize that there's very little meaning either in our life or in our work. We could begin to feel that the life that we’ve been living is not the one we chose, and day by day we lose heart. “What did I do wrong?” we might muse to ourselves. We could find ourselves dealing with the pain of unexpected loneliness, finding ourselves without close friendships, and feeling confused how it came to this. We could be dealing with illness that saps our energy and compromises the quality of our life, limiting the things we can do. Or we suddenly recognize that we’re in an older body, having diminished energy, suffering aches and pains that we never had before. It seems like just a short time ago we were enjoying downhill skiing and hiking, and now we need walking poles to walk a flat trail. It can all feel surrealistic and haunting.
    
Such disappointments drop us into places that we wouldn’t go to voluntarily. Yet there's something valuable about being delivered to our depths, beyond ego’s controlled and rational world. As spiritual practitioners we’re encouraged to bring disappointments onto our path, so that we witness how we try to protect ourselves from the raw, rugged, and unpredictable aspects of life. The Buddhist practice is to develop complete openness to whatever life brings us, so that we experience all situations and the feelings they evoke, without reservations. This is a daring gesture, but the spiritual process is an initiation--one that can transform our disillusionments into a refreshing sense of openness and intimacy with life.

Many years ago I decided to live in a small cabin in rural Vermont in order to meditate and write. After several years I ran out of money and needed to resume working again, but I didn't know what to do. I was a veteran teacher with a Ph.D., but I wanted to work with human suffering in a deeper way than teaching permitted. So, I continued meditating and writing, dropping deeper into my condition, as emptiness stretched out and filled the margins of my life. In truth, I was at a loss and felt groundless.
    
One winter evening a friend telephoned me, sounding very shaky. He explained that his wife had just left him and that he had started drinking and smoking again, and was feeling really scared. I invited him to come over, knowing that the northern Vermont roads in the evening were mostly empty, and cautioned him to drive very safely. Forty minutes later, Benjamin arrived with his two dogs, a case of beer and a carton of cigarettes. He sat down and began talking from a place of deep hurt. I was just there with him listening deeply to his feelings of loss and hurt. We stayed up all night talking about the pain of betrayal and abandonment, life and love, men and women, meaninglessness and the purpose-driven life. By about 5:00 a.m. I began preparing breakfast and made a pot of strong coffee.
    
After a silent breakfast, we sat quietly as the morning light filled the kitchen. At some point I looked at Benjamin and asked, "You okay?" to which he replied, "Yeah, I am actually." An hour or two later, after many cups of coffee, he stated that he felt safe to drive. He thanked me for being there for him, summoned his two dogs and started moving towards the door. With his body halfway out the door, he abruptly turned to me and said, "You should do this for a living!” At that moment, everything that was vague and uncertain in my life, crystallized on the spot into a direction. Within a month I applied to graduate school again, but this time to get a clinical degree so that I could become a psychotherapist—one who could integrate psychotherapy with spirituality. This event awakened in me a calling, a sincere wish to be there for others during their “dark night.”
    
Prior to Benjamin's visit I was lost and confused about what to do with my life. My commitment to my spiritual path was to not deny my true condition, and so I remained in that unsettled feeling of having lost my way. I could not find the reassuring cord that connected one chapter of my life with the others, giving it a sense of coherence and continuity. The encounter with Benjamin was an initiation. Because my mind and heart had been ripened through so much disappointment, as the seed of possibility fell, it blossomed immediately. All of me was there in that vivid moment with Benjamin.
    
​Although it seems counterintuitive, when we keep company with disappointment, especially during a dark night of the soul, something positively unexpected might come of it. At the same time, we mustn't forget to extend compassion and loving-kindness to ourselves, and not judge ourselves harshly when we're feeling bereft, confused, and lonely. It's important that we shine kindness, gentleness, and tenderness on ourselves so that we can remain intimately connected with our mind and body, heart and soul during such periods.

                          ​

By today’s sociological standards midlife ranges between approximately 40 to 60 years of age. Initially, it might announce itself with the question, "Is this it? Is this all there is?" We might feel a vague sense of stagnation, at a loss for how to go forward. By the time we reach the midpoint of our lives, imperceptibly, something may have changed deep within us, as if our personal atmosphere flattened in tone, became somewhat gray and indistinct. Our days and weeks may seem to run together, merging into dull normalcy. In the background of our lives we might feel a vague sense of disenchantment, as we yearn for something more. ​

The motivation to embark on a spiritual path comes from the uncompromising experience of dissatisfaction. Plodding along day after day we might suddenly realize that we've been on a plateau without having experienced anything new, fresh, eventful, or uplifting for a very long time. There’s no longer a song in our heart, yet we feel compelled to keep the beat going, dutifully walking the tried and true way of many yesterdays, until one day when we can no longer postpone the urgent need to cut the rope and be free.

The spiritual passage begins with questioning some of our cherished assumptions about who we are and whether the life we have chosen for ourselves has been a conscious choice. By considering these questions we retreat from the world into our own depths where great challenges wait for us. ​

The fact of aging is not a problem, but our ideas of aging are. Aging reminds us that we’re mortal and that time will run out on us. It’s a wakeup call that we have to ease our grip on whomever or whatever we're holding, so that we travel lightly. This gesture of surrender permits our human journey to evolve, but we have great resistance to letting go because it confronts us with uncertainty. ​

The irony is that if we’re not able to die, in the sense of letting go, then we’re really not able to live fully. Without an ever present sense of impermanence, life is insipid. Our awareness and benign acceptance of our necessary mortality can heighten our love of life. ​

In the esoteric schools of spiritual practice, the left-hand path refers to the more radical understanding and methods for discovering enlightenment where we’d least expect to find it. The left-hand path, sometimes known as tantra, includes the teaching of the five wisdom energies which are associated with the basic elements of earth, water, fire, wind, and space, that we all possess. These energies have the power to re-spark our sacred or magical connection with life, the life we may remember from childhood. ​