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

We Are not Cows and Birds Are not Real The finger pointing at the moon is not the moon. Buddhist teaching   What else I have learned: small egos thrive on circumstances that feel like a crisis. Calamities allow these self-obsessed inner personalities—and their...

Making a Difference 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...

What I Learned from Talking Crows   Drugs are a window but not a door. Ram Dass I assume you know psychedelics have been used in trauma research recently, which might seem a radical idea but in fact it’s a really old idea, the stuff of shamans. As a therapist,...

  The Prelude "Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.”  John Muir [i] My first dog was named Lucky Merriweather. He was a liver-colored Springer Spaniel with scraggly hair that stuck like fur...

    Out of Restraints: Inspiration Inside-out and Upside-down   Ray Holland     Only after one hundred days of consistent work, only then is the light genuine, only then can one begin to work with the spirit fire. Lu Dongbin, The Secret of the Golden Flower.  ...

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...