Good Clean Reads

Last night I got a text from my teenaged daughter’s ex-boyfriend. I like him so much, and am mourning her recent break-up with him. I saw it coming… as the balance of attraction and desire became lopsided, I knew that it was unlikely with their limited capacity to understand and express how things fell out of mutuality, that they would find their way back to each other. Once the scales tip, small...

”It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” ~Henry David Thoreau

We all have them; these silent judgments, which invisibly harden into prejudice and separate us from whoever it is that we deem the “other,” whether based on race, religion or sexual identity. It is the invisible and unacknowledged judgments that maintain the strongest holds on us, limiting our ability to wonder and to be...

“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” -Dalai Lama

I spend most of my days trying to help but am only just learning how to receive help. The weakest link and most meaningful learning in my fledgling practice to receive help is in having the courage to ask and believe I can get the help I need. This applies to everything from...

“You, yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”  -Buddha

I have come to believe that so many relationships are so hurtful because we believe that is the love we deserve. For years after my parents’ divorce, I watched my mother have a 30- year affair with a man who would never really show up for her in the ways she needed. She would end it over and...

“In violence we forget who we are.” -Mary McCarthy

Seeing a pro-football player knock out his girlfriend on an elevator video captures our collective attention. The league is held responsible for not taking the violence seriously, giving the offender a two game suspension, and then, after the public outcry, they expel him indefinitely. Intimate crimes persist, in part, because we don’t want to...

Give it away. I remember reading one time that one of my favorite highly evolved spiritual teachers gave away anything that she had grown too attached to. I am not at that level in my own development, although I am turning a corner about understanding what things are worth. The truth is that the more you possess, the more time and energy it takes to maintain. And then at the end of a life of...

“Concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.”  -Charles M. Blow

To my mind, the most powerful reckoning we make in this lifetime is with our sexual selves. Rarely are we privileged to bear witness to this process in others, even our most intimate others. So, when a NY Times columnisthas the courage to disclose how an act of childhood sexual abuse slowly evolved into a...

“Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”  -Sydney Harris

 

We come into our erotic consciousness in our early adolescence. The process is mostly subconscious as the maturing brain establishes unique patterns of...

The first conscious thought I strive to have each day is a grateful one.

Lately I am awake at least a couple of times – in and out of weird, anxious dreams. So it is not unusual that my first thoughts are anxious too. It is amazing how fast a couple of errant anxious ideas can spiral down into low grade rumination. Reminding myself through mediation to first create a grateful moment changes...