Two things in my online mailbox yesterday touched me deeply. One was a post from a psychotherapist I follow named Martha. Here’s the link. I urge you to read it. It’s about the challenges faced by people who go to therapists, and what they get out of it.
How can human beings possibly know the nature of God? We can’t, of course. Yet ever since our species realized we were alive and part of a vast living Mystery, we’ve been trying. And whether we’re religious or not, most of us have some ideas about this Mystery. It seems to me we look at God from three major perspectives.
I know people who find what they call “navel gazing” distasteful because of the apparent emphasis on “me, myself and I.” What they don’t realize is that self-discovery is often a response to problematic relationships that pays off big time by creating healthier ones.
If someone had told me three years ago that one day I’d enjoy working out twice a week I wouldn’t have believed them. I’ve never liked to exercise, never felt the need. But sore shoulders and lower back pain from sitting hunched over a computer every day for years have a way of creeping up on you, and I finally had to admit I needed an exercise routine.
Conflict and criticism have always made me anxious and my natural tendency is to avoid them. While this strategy has surely protected me from some discomfort, it never completely eliminated it. Crouching behind a wall makes you hyper sensitive to possible encroachment and it’s easy to mistake friendly missives for enemy fire. You can miss out on a lot of help and healing that way.
I’ve been putting myself under a lot of pressure lately to think and write practically non-stop! Aargh! The pressure! So today I’m going to write about the first thing that pops in my head. No pressure. Just open up and let the ideas flow.
We’re living in the midst of a psycho-spiritual revolution such as the world has never seen, and as usual, we’re responding with fear and resistence. The human race has reached the end of a very long youth and is approaching maturity. When an ego stands in the threshold between adolescence and young adulthood it longs for a return of the traditional values that nurtured it, yet it cannot help but notice that these values did not create the love, peace, meaning and fulfillment it assumed they would.
This month marks the second birthday of this blog. Writing it has been an extraordinary experience in many ways, but the most meaningful and joyful part has been meeting you. Knowing you are out there has been deeply comforting, and reading your inspiring thoughts and figuring out how to respond has had a powerful impact on my work. I love it that our dialogues have motivated me to clarify my thinking and explore new ideas. Most of all I appreciate how you’ve helped me trust myself and be bolder about sharing my truths, especially concerning religion and spirituality.
Did anyone sign your high school yearbook, “Don’t ever change”? Maybe you wrote it in a few yearbooks yourself. This is the normal desire of an adolescent ego. What it wants is so simple: to be old enough to drive, get a job, earn a lot of money, become independent, satisfy all its instinctual desires as much as it wants to…and then stop growing.
We meet our anima and animus as they are reflected in other people (both in waking life and dreams) who are so fascinating to us that we are filled with wonder and awe. This “spiritual” falling-in-love feeling of having been touched by the Mystery is the tip-off that we’ve met an image of our anima or animus, for they are the feminine and masculine sides of the Self, our God-image.
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