Blog Posts
Exploring ideas related to life, relationships, spirituality and mental health.
Living Through the Maps of Your Mind
Traveling usually requires directions. With the advent of GPS, the history of more broadly keeping an eye on where we're going seems to have gone away. Stories litter the Internet of people who got into accidents because they followed the GPS directions...
The I of Our Identity
There can be only one identity, one "I" that moves through events observing and directing behavior. Personal experience seems to support this notion. Thoughts and emotions seem to arise out of the maelstrom of our internal world in response to information we...
Drones: Warfare Without Worry of Consequence
Overwrought declarations concerning the security of a nation's people is the bread and butter of modern politics. Every potential leader of the self-proclaimed free world attempts to outdo another with over-confident pronouncements of their ability to defeat the...
Being Present in the Space of Grief
Grief, as much as it often inspires thoughts of separation, is our mind's way of recognizing how close we truly all are. Loss is as much a part of life as growth, each movement a step away from one space and towards another. There is no gender, economic status or...
Our Mind Provides A God To Be Filled In
Divine love seems inexplicably tied to divine judgment at times. With even a cursory search online the subsequent finding of so many articles and images depicting people of otherwise benign feelings supporting hatred and irrational judgment, the only seeming...
A Context for Every Self
"Who we are is a story of our self—a constructed narrative that our brain creates." (Hood, 2012) The how of that construction provides ample space for frustration when our actions don't fit what we believe ourselves to be; confusion when what we say is not as clear...
Reconnected Value: Working through Moral Injury
Trauma is a profoundly human experience, happening to anyone regardless of gender, race, or profession. The degree of its effect is varied, the form it takes is most certainly tied to environmental and cultural context, and what is called into question are the...
Military Service and Moral Injury
Dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori - it is sweet and right to die for your country. The first section, the Latin for "it is sweet and right" served as title for one of the best known poems from the First World War by Wilfred Owen. Posed as a question, Owen's...
Our Evolving Minds: Change in Context
The tempestuous connection between nature and nurture, empiricism and social analysis, science and philosophy, has largely been a concern with self-knowledge. When we look in the mirror, ponder our behavior and seek greater understanding of our relationships, we...
Our Journeys of Chance
The lucky-save is a classic story, that event awash with emotional weight, in which the person survived by the merest, slightest, of chances. Were a microphone to be present at the time, the likely most common phrase after would be "Whoa! That was lucky!" though...
Mastering Your Placebo
Mind over matter, that's the hope and aspiration explored in fantasy literature and speculative science fiction, promoted through various product-lines and explicitly endorsed in many religious ceremonies and practices. Implicitly, 'mind over matter'...
Freedom Through Dependency
The spectrum of dependency runs from the need to cling to someone for support and emotional safety is only a slight shift in perception away from the other side of becoming "clingy." The former inspires sighs of contentment, the latter of exasperation. For those...
Why We Carefully Select Our Delusions
The nature of our mind's "I" is a delightful example of illusory control. We possess it when we wake up, lose it when we go to sleep and rarely consider the variations that reside between those two states. We hardly ever need to. Contemplation of our conscious...
Embracing the Fetishes of Humanity
Directing attention to the atypical by labeling it deviant is a time-proven way of utilizing shame as a social control. "Why can't you be more like x?" is the parental equivalent of the social admonition "don't rock the boat" and the childhood condemnation of "you...
Disagreement Is Not Mental Illness
We construct our personal experiences, the relationships we engage in and the seeming choices we make through the mind's eye that is our conscious lives. As we do these things, we typically believe that we are mentally coherent, sane and possessed of a degree...
Vibrant Wellness, How to Embrace Yours Now
Whether professionally as a therapist or personally as one among many taking life one day at a time, the issue of wellness, particularly mental health, is often front and center, or at least a persistent, just below the surface, consideration. Unfortunately, we...
The Expectation of Memory
Memory exists as a source of immeasurable joy and pleasure with loved ones and children and laughter and achievements parading across our conscious lives, even as it holds the repository of one of our greatest fears, that of its loss in dementia, alzheimer's and...
The Endowment of Purpose in Human Work
All activity demands two forms of projection from us: intention and endowment. Picture someone pushing a large empty barrel up a hill. At each step a mechanism fills the barrel with an increasing amount of water. If the person were to stop, the water would cease...