Looking back, knowing what I know now, I see how dissociation is an outcome of living in a traumatizing society. Often pressures start in our families with our parents and siblings with demands that we follow rules and roles without questioning them; and, in order to...

Obviously, I’m a mental health therapist, and this may be a career quite different from yours. But, if I’m not mistaken, even if you have no understanding or interest in therapy, you too know the utter frustration of working with an organization that seems preordained...

The crises on-the-ground related to substance abuse and AIDS was rapidly intensifying. Clients were frightened and dying in astounding numbers, getting incarcerated, treated as pariahs, selling off their possessions to get drugs, losing marriages and jobs. But that...

Fast forward. Vermont far behind me, I became a supervisor in a drug and alcohol rehab program when crack cocaine and the AIDS epidemic were decimating communities of color in central Florida. As an undergraduate in Vermont, I had wanted to be a journalist, but the...

If self-development and spiritual development are part of the same spectrum of consciousness and not simply antagonists then early damage to the former can cripple the emergence of the latter. Ken Wilbur, The Eye of Spirit Not long out of college, I happily returned...

Maybe you noticed it too, the summer of 2020, when the CDC put out a serious warning about Ivermectin, a medication effective for lice (applied to the scalp) and for use with livestock as a deworming treatment (injected, commonly). “We’re not cows,” they said. But the...

Prelude Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up Foster’d alike by beauty and by fear.              William Wordsworth, The Prelude [i] A dose of shame can sometimes soften the defended Heart, make our weaknesses and unavoidable, remind us of our humanity. But it...

                               Lord Lucky Merriweather Long dead, my dog, Lucky, chased rocks I threw, even down into the beaver pond. He would pluck those balls clenched in his teeth Off the muddy bottom and come up gagging. He had a furious commitment to the game,...

Lucky My first dog was named Lucky Merriweather. He was a liver-colored Springer Spaniel with scraggly hair that stuck like fur potholders to the furniture. When I was a young boy, he was a solid, steady force for me. We were puppies together for a time, and, with...

  Destroyed by Madness I saw the best minds of my generation, destroyed by madness, starving hysterically naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.”       Allen Ginsberg. Howl [i]  Like the Abnormal energies of a...