I've been doing the almost-nightly sitting practice (I'm still loathe to call it meditation because I feel like I'm still knocking at the door of the practice, rather than actually *meditating*) long enough to start forming some observations about what happens during that time. Because getting the mind to still is such a huge part of the process, ( Read more... )

There is a delightfully trite cliché that insists that the Universe (or God, or Karma, or the Goddess, or whatever your Higher-Authority-of-Choice is) never throws at us more than we can handle, it's only a measure of our willingness to rise to the challenges that makes us grow or keeps us small in those choices ( Read more... )

(And something I can refer to more generally than needing to have a reference book open in front of me for transcriptions ( Read more... )

Last night on Gloria's recommendation, I attended a special seminar given by the woman who usually presents the Mastery of Self-Expression workshops, on "Happiness: It Isn't What You Think". Except that it totally was, and while it's always nice to have what you've been/are doing validated by finding others who think/do things similarly to oneself ( Read more... )

The recent Slutwalk event is driving an increased public awareness of the idea of "not blaming the victim" when it comes to people subjected to unwelcome interactions scaling from undesirable interest all the way up to outright sexual attacks. I'm all in favour of wide-spread education about boundaries and the shared lexicon of what's effective and ( Read more... )

Today I think about language as a tool used in restorative justice.

Accountability is a big part of the restorative justice models used by organizations like CJI. One of the ways they encourage participants in their program and groups to take ownership of their own experiences and expressions by replacing the ambiguity of "you" statements with the ( Read more... )

"Hope and faith are different. Whereas faith is self-affirming and acceptance of life as it is, hope involves a dissatisfaction with self and present circumstance, and is dependent upon external events or people to provide change. People hope that life will be different, or better, or fuller; their hoping involves a lack of acceptance and a thrust ( Read more... )

i've had a lot of cause to reflect on the way in which people establish friendships recently. ( cut to spare those who don't enjoy the social anthropology noodlings of this blog :) )

a lot of modern western psychotherapy - including the versions many of us, ourselves, have experienced directly as consumers of therapy resources (sessions, tutorials and workshops, self-help and self-discovery books) - can be summed up as being a journey of uncovering "i", digging the Self up from layers of muck piled on us or self-accumulated ( Read more... )

Lerner's Dance of Intimacy was my first detailed introduction to the concept of triangulation in relationships; it was something i had encountered briefly in readings years ago, a little more in depth with gloria when we started exploring the fact that i don't select my intimate relationships for exclusivity ( Read more... )