Children internalize the psychological atmosphere of the parents, as well as their outer environmental conditions. General family dynamics, socioeconomic resources, and other cultural conditions, reinforce the primal messages about the self and the world. Only decades later, if even then, are we able to differentiate that powerful “other” from

As our brother Job learned, our presumptive contracts are delusory efforts by the ego to be in control. We learn that life is much riskier, more powerful, more mysterious than we had ever thought possible. While we are rendered more uncomfortable by this discovery, it is a humbling that deepens spiritual possibility. The world is more magical, less

Where has life, in its unfairness, stuck you, fixated you, caused you to circle back and back upon this wounding as a provisional definition and limitation of your possibilities? Why do you continue to cooperate with the wound, rather than serve something larger, which serves you in return?

Almost everyone has some addictive pattern. Any reflexive response to stress and anxiety, whether conscious or not, is a form of addiction. The chief motive of any addiction is, of course, to help one not feel what in fact one has already been feeling. Breaking the tyranny of the addiction will require one to feel the pain that the addiction

The only antidote to this form of paralyzing guilt is resolve, the determination to risk being who we are meant to be by stepping into choices that enlarge rather than bind us to the past.

The avoidance of our mortal, transient condition is pathological. To be mindful of our fragile fate each day, in a non-morbid acknowledgment, helps us remember what is important in our life and what is not, what matters, really, and what does not.

To go down into that anxiety state, to really feel what we already feel, and to learn that we are not really destroyed by it, is to “go through” the addiction to its other side. It is to break the tyranny of anxiety without ceasing to feel anxious.

Additionally, recourse to violence, racism and bigotry, regressive behavior of any type, always derives from a constricted imagination. When we are stuck in history, or the provincial ministry of our complexes, the imagination is always stunted. “The fallacy of overgeneralization,” by which our lives circle around the old complexes as splinter

The psyche, for all its mystery, is very clear, and very logical, once we have begun to open the ego’s resistance to an honest dialogue.