A quote by John Welwood

We have used it to feed a false sense of spirituality grounded in being good, meaning superior.

Such Christian activities become detrimental when we use them in an unconscious attempt to escape pain.

Insight Meditation and similar Buddhist practices can lead to quietude, to withdrawal from and fear of the world. The emptiness taught in Zen and nondualist Vedanta can lead to a related problem, to being disconnected and ungrounded. Any form of idealistic, otherworldly teaching that sees life on earth as a dream or focuses on higher realms can lea

The doorway into the silent land is a wound. Silence lays bare this wound. We do not journey far along the spiritual path before we get some sense of the wound of the human condition, and this is precisely why not a few abandon a contemplative practice like meditation as soon as it begins to expose this wound; they move on instead to some spiritual

Emotional bypassing is when you intentionally use the witnessing state as a means to purposefully avoid feeling or even noticing painful emotions. It’s a spiritual form of being in emotional denial. The true witnessing state is both a freedom from being held captive by whatever you are experiencing and a freedom to experience whatever experience yo