Your First Responsibility is Your Balance

The normal challenges in life – surrounding our work, our families and relationships, our goals and creations – will make demands on our energy and will require an amount of our resources and focus. When these external situations become unbalanced – as they certainly will from time to time – they will tend to draw more from us. And becau...
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Managing Your ‘Sensitivity’

If you are drawn to meditation, you are no doubt “sensitive.” And as we practice meditation, our sensitivity will certainly grow: sensitivity to our own feelings, “energy,” and state of being … and sensitivity to that of others, sensitivity to the situations around us, sensitivity to the world. This sensitivity is, of course, a st...
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Uncertainty and Transition

Be you ever so wise, confident, and “enlightened,” you will nonetheless find yourself at times uncertain: uncertain about what actions to take, uncertain about your life, uncertain about your place or purpose in this life. At such times, we tend to think of ourselves as confused or lost, and consequently feel fearful, “unsupported” in th...
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Finding Your Purpose

Life seems almost perfectly arranged to keep us guessing as to why we are here … about our role, our place, in this world.

At one moment the problems of the wider world seem to call to us with the greatest urgency. In the next, these vanish as we’re called to our own urgent needs. The sublime achievements of others can inspire us, exciting ...
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Loving the Self: Part 1

Of all the learning we do in this life, learning to love ourselves is perhaps the most challenging and certainly the most fundamental and instrumental to the quality of our lives. Ultimately, loving ourselves amounts to nothing more than seeing ourselves clearly. The challenge, however, is that from our earliest years our lives tend to distort our view of ourse...
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Loving the Self: Part 2

Breaking our patterns of unworthiness will indeed require our deliberate intention, awareness, and choice. It will often require outright discipline, because these wounded beliefs can seem quite real to us … and the wounded patterns can seem justifiable.

Moving out of the ‘wounded energy’

Why do they seem so real? Because wh...
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Understanding (and Silencing) the ‘Inner Critic’

We all know it, only too well. It’s that inner voice, that “inner critic,” that seems always present and always keenly prepared to defeat us. When we feel happy, the voice says: “Yeah, this can’t last.” When we’re about to attempt something, it whispers: “Watch out. You’re gonna fail.” And when we do s...
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A Context for Healing – Part 1

The conventional context for healing is simple: we have a wound, the wound is treated, when the wound no longer exists we say we are healed. It’s a “binary” view: we’re either whole or we’re not. And that “wholeness” looks more or less the same on everyone.

But while this context may work well for a simple, phys...
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A Context for Healing – Part 2

We concluded Part 1 of this article emphasizing that in the context of our personal healing, judgment and comparisons simply do not apply. Our particular healing – our particular areas of challenge – are ours and unique to us.

Indeed, to judge or condemn them is to misunderstand their role in our lives. In fact, it is by honoring our areas o...
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The Most ‘Delicate’ Stage in Healing – Part 1

(Note: Please read Meditations2Go Article: A Context for Healing as background for this article.)

You’ll recall from “A Context for Healing” that when it comes to our personal healing, it’s best to see our “wounding” not so much as an area we are fixing, but an area or aspect of ourselves where we have chosen to disco...
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The Most ‘Delicate’ Stage in Healing – Part 2

Moving out of this “stinging,” defensive phase of our healing simply requires our awareness, our understanding … and a little conscious discipline. That conscious discipline comes into play when we acknowledge and concede that pain and wisdom rarely travel together within us. Being human, we tend to “react” to pain, rather than re...
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What Our Pain Tells Us – Part 1

t has been wisely observed that though we may strive to be “one with” the universe or some higher knowing or truth, in practice we tend to be one with our comfort. And as we’ve discussed elsewhere in these articles, as “sensitive” beings we are particularly sensitized to our own pain. [See Meditations2Go Article: Managing Your Sens...
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What Our Pain Tells Us – Part 2

Pain is not a punishment. It’s not personal.

One of the ways we elevate our pain beyond the simple human reaction that it is, is by interpreting our pain or loss as a punishment or a sign of failure. We see the pain – and the events leading to it – as personal. And though these events may have been out of our control or despite our b...
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The Seasons of Your Heart

As we approach the holidays we look forward with great yearning to a time of joy and happiness, for lightness and warmth. It is for us a season of fond memories, great anticipation, and much planning. And whereas this yearning and anticipation is quite understandable, we know that it can also be a bit of a trap.

Expecting great joy and not finding it, w...
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