“I just feel so irritable today, I don’t know why.  Guess I just woke up on the wrong side of the bed.”  Ever said that?  Ever said, “I don’t know why I’m crying!”  Ever cried when you were mad, when all you wanted to do was cuss someone out?  We’ve been taught for so many centuries that our feelings, our emotions were just unnecessary but troublesome appendages.  Our job then, was just to pretend them away for so long that when they made themselves evident, we would not recognize them or…

Since birth we’ve heard it again and again, “Be nice!”  Our mothers said it, our fathers said it, our grandparents said it, our teachers, preachers and religious leaders of all type said it.  Be nice!  It seems to be the ultimate in being loving.  But being loving isn’t necessarily nice. 

Nice means being pleasant, being pleasing, being polite and perhaps even self-deprecating.  Being nice means that we smile even when we don’t feel like smiling.  Being nice means always saying…

When you get up in the morning and you open the blinds to look out for the first fresh time that day to your front lawn or your backyard, can you see the peace that makes up the natural world?  Can you see that the sky and its holdings are just hanging there peacefully?  Can you see that the trees in your neighborhood represent so fully the silence and the presence of stillness?  And while you are looking at the peace in the natural world, can you hear the gentle movement of the wind, or the…

The life scenarios pass by oh so quickly, run through the filter of our absence or our presence.  We are either there, really there, or we are vaguely absent as the breaths, the heartbeats, the rhythms of life pass us by.  Is there something going on in the background, the underground, the basement of our lives?  Something making meaning of our messes?  Something that is meaning itself?  

Is there some process, some illuminating movement, like background music playing to…

Many if not most spiritual teachers are telling us that fear is the opposite of love and that if we are afraid we cannot be living in spirit.  But fear, like every other emotion, has a wisdom, a genius all its own.  We are not meant to square off against our emotions, pretend they are not there or try to shoo them away. We are meant to use them as a kind of internal messaging system that allows us to grow into greater and greater awareness of who we are as divine beings. 

Fear has a…

What is the playground of the mind?  Where does it dally?  What is the range of possibilities available to you within the scope of your mind?  No, I’m not going to talk to you, yet again, about the Law of Attraction.  I’m going to talk to you about the range of possibilities inherent within the Good/Evil spectrum. 

            You see, most of us grew up believing that there was a standardized definition of “good” and a standardized definition of “evil.”  The spectrum actually ranges…

Many, if not most of us, are spending our lives seeking that sense of self-worth we are promised when we finally become “good enough” in whatever way we see "good enough."  This is because from infancy we’ve been taught that there is actually a "good enough."  There is some place, some psychic place, some happy place, some invisible but certain place out there somewhere in the future where we will finally feel that sense of worthiness that generates self-confidence and self-esteem. …

If only we knew that we ARE the essence at the heart of peace. That knowing would allow us to see peace as communication from the authentic Self, the soul, the spirit. It would allow us to see that we are in alignment with truth.

But that knowing comes hard to us, as we live in earth consciousness, in which we believe not only that we are separate from the divine (in whatever form we see the divine) but also separate from our own souls. If we allow ourselves to think about it, to…

Oprah always says, “love looks like love.”  I agree.  Love is not possessiveness, jealousy, power-plays, attempts to control or abuse.  Love looks like love.  But what does that look like?…

Sometimes being good is very, very bad.  In fact, trying to be "good" can often mean that we are self-sabotaging, self-negating, and may even be harming others.  

That and more is what is being exposed in the book, being released on August 8th from Llewellyn Publishing, entitled, "Letting Go of Good: Dispel the Myth of Goodness to Find Your Genuine Self."  With a Foreword by Thomas Moore, bestselling author of Care of the Soul, and endorsements from Caroline Myss, Dr. Larry…

For years now we have heard, from many of our most prodigious spiritual leaders, that fear and love cannot occupy the same space, for fear is not love and love casts out fear.  Therefore, many of have spent those years trying desperately to rid themselves of fear, thinking that that act will somehow cleanse them to be the true spiritual beings that they are. 

I know it will feel like sacrilege, but what if it isn’t true?  What if it is not true that we should get rid of our fear in…

For centuries now our spiritual teachers have been teaching us that anger is a bad emotion. Most commonly today we are taught that anger has physical, emotional and psychological consequences that none of us want. Anger, according to these teachings, makes us say and do things we regret. It makes us feel so-called “negative feelings” and think so-called “negative thoughts,” which if extended to the most popular version of the Law of Attraction, will bring us “negative” life…

Our earliest and most archetypal thinking regarding the nature of humanity  combined suffering with evil so profoundly that we still believe on a deep unconscious level that they belong together.  From a dualistic perspective what this means is that we often still hold an archetypal belief that we suffer because a) we are not One with an external divine entity, and, therefore, cannot…

Much as it sounds like it, this article is not going to be about bashing the narcissists out there.  Rather, what it intends to facilitate is an awareness of how even narcissism can become an awakening. 

First, everyone is a narcissist to some degree.  We all have a primary concern for self, self-protection, self-actualization and self-facilitation and more.  We all wish to fulfill our desires.  So, in the same way that an infant, toddler and pre-schooler is narcissistic, we are all…

When stories like that of James Arthur Ray or Jim Jones are brought to our attention, we are usually made aware of them because people have died or been so seriously injured as to warrant national media attention.  We would definitely say that these people have misled others for personal gain, or because they, themselves, were misled by some philosophy.  But what we don’t know is that people are “dying” every day because of spiritual abuse. 

Anytime someone teaches someone…

So many of those of us who are attempting to live a conscious life have heard, and/or tried to live out of the principles of negativity and positivity.  We have heard and believed what we have been taught regarding the negativity of a fear, for example, that says we might not succeed on a given project.  We have heard and believed what we have been taught regarding the power of the so-called negative thought or feeling to bring us equally negative experiences.  We have heard and believed the…

Most of us in the Western world and many in the Eastern world have been taught that heaven is a place. Not only is it a place, but it is a place to which we may retire upon death—i.e., it cannot be had prior to death, except in those rare instances in which we might say that we get a little taste of it through some euphoric event.

Further, most who participate in Western religion, have been taught that we can find reference to this particular description of heaven in the…

When the law of attraction first came into public awareness approximately 20 years ago, with the writings of Ester and Jerry Hicks and Rhonda Byrne, the thinking was that if you thought positive thoughts, you would attract positive things into your life.  This notion was taken very seriously, to the point that many started consciously watching each thought and each word, lest it…

What if it is only possible to constantly evolve into an ever growing awareness of who we are as constituent parts of the Divine? What if every single incarnation--rather than being a karmic reward or punishment for the life that preceded it--is actually one incremental stitch in the whole fabric of I AM? But we could only imagine that possible if we begin to see through the eyes of Oneness, rather than those of the duality trance state in which we all live. 

     The duality trance…