The Dangers of Oversimplicating
Do you want to get stuck in life, carry chronic stress, or remain in persistent conflicts?. If so, here's what to do. Oversimplify things, failing to see the subtleties and complexities. Then, to compensate for your oversimplified view of the world, overcomplicate things, adding all kinds of unnecessary extra meaning.
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Thwarting Loneliness on the Path to Transformation
Walking the path to transformation can be a lonely journey. When you set out on your own, and part ways with the pack, it is always, in some ways, a solitary undertaking.
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Don't (Just) Get Angry
Anger mobilizes power. In an oppressive world, we are made to feel powerless and act powerlessly. To work on behalf of social justice, we need to break out of feeling powerless, to get our voices back, to get in action. Anger helps make all this possible. Getting angry is an essential step in reclaiming power!
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Your Partner Is Not
Who You Think They Are
Who You Think They Are
You want one thing. Your partner wants another. Do you need to compromise, so neither of you really gets what you want? Does one person need to sacrifice, perhaps at the cost of resenting the other? Is there any way for both of you to win?
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Why Counseling Should be More Like Dating (and vice versa)
Dating and counseling are two of my favorite relational forms! They may seem unrelated at first, but both share the goal of creating an unusual depth of intimacy in an unusually short period of time.
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The Intimacy Equation
If you want a fulfilling life, you need fulfilling relationships. But what makes a relationship fulfilling? In a word, intimacy. Intimacy is the experience of feeling genuinely connected instead of separate, sensing that you and someone else are a part of something together.
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How to Fulfill All Your Sexual Fantasies
Your relationship with desire strongly influences the quality of your life. If you don't know what you want, how can you be guided toward the things that will fulfill you most? Unless you sense your own desire, how can you know what you want?
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What to Do When You're Feeling Sorry for Yourself
No one wants to feel sorry for themselves. It's got a pretty bad rap. I mean, who wants to wallow in self-pity, or stay stuck in the victim role, or dwell on the past?
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Decolonize Your Mind
Your thoughts are not your own. Many of your most private, most personal thoughts are not actually yours at all.
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The Other Safe Sex Conversation
How do you decide if you want to have sex with someone? Presumably you would choose someone you're attracted to in some compelling way. Mutual interest on their part also seems to be a key ingredient. Once you've got those basics established, it's time to get down and have some highly intimate conversation!
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How To Make Friends With Anyone
Just because you have friends, doesn't mean you know how to make friends. There is an art to making friends, and not everyone learns it. Fortunately, even if you never learn the art, you can wind up with friends anyway. There are some disadvantages, however, to just winding up with friends. You limit the range of people you can befriend; you tend to just have friends who are a lot like you; and you lose out on the excitement of deliberately pursuing a friendship with someone new.
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Getting Good at Getting Rejected
Here's what's great about getting rejected! Many of life's most desirable experiences and meaningful relationships come from asking for what you want. If you're too afraid of getting rejected, you won't ask for what you want. If you don't ask, you definitely won't get it. It takes courage to ask, and to risk rejection.
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Anxiety as a Path to Liberation
Why do you get anxious? Is anxiety just an unpleasant feeling you need to try to shake? Is anxiety merely a dysfunction that randomly takes over some people's brains and needs to be managed? There is actually a lot more to the story of anxiety. Like so many disturbances in our lives, anxiety actually has an essential role to play, and it has something to do with our working models of the world.
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How to Live to 300
No one knows how long they're going to live for. Nonetheless, when I ask almost anyone what age they think they're going to live to, they give me a number. We act as if we're going to live to 65, or 85, or 100, and this belief changes everything about how we structure our lives. It is as if we know the overall shape of our lifespans, and we pour our imaginary futures into those shapes. If I think I'm going to live to be a certain age, then I'll probably also believe there are activities I'm too old for, accomplishments I should have achieved by now, a schedule my life ought to follow. Scheduling our lives along imaginary timelines limits us.
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Are You a Leader?
Are you a leader? Some people answer that question with an unqualified yes. Some people wish they could be leaders, but assume leadership is for other people. Some people respond by wondering why they would ever want to be a leader, because their associations with leadership are so negative.
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Why Your Huge Breakthroughs Don't Stick
I really do share your excitement about the huge breakthrough you just had. Something new and exciting has clearly happened for you, and I'm in full support of the change! Why, then, you ask, do I not seem as excited as you do? Well, I wonder if what you're experiencing is not exactly a breakthrough just yet, but more of a promising pre-breakthrough experience.
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How to Flirt (with everything)
I've seen you. You always want to connect with people, but you're not always sure how to do it. Sometimes it just happens. You find that, somehow, one of you has invited the other to play. Without being serious, without anyone trying too hard, you find that you're just enjoying each other, and that part of what you're enjoying is this exciting sense that something more is possible.
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The Grief Cheatsheet: 6 Essential Reminders About How to Grieve
Grieving is our natural response when someone dies. In cultural communities where crying is discouraged and endings are not always properly honored, we have had to rediscover for ourselves how to fully and honestly grieve. The inspiring response of my community to the recent death of two friends has inspired me to put together this grieving cheatsheet: six principles I find it useful to remember as we grieve together.
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Openness to Experience
Have you had any firsts this week? Y'know, firsts: things you've never done before, new experiences, new experiments. We're at the beginning of a new year, a perfect time to remember the importance of firsts.
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Oppression 101
Overcoming oppression is one of the primary things that clients need your help to do. They may not realize it, because they may not understand yet the ways they've been hurt and limited by oppression. That makes it all the more important that YOU understand oppression. Here's a 10-minute crash course in the basics. The main points are summarized below the video.
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Which Story Do You Want To Tell?
We come to understand the experiences we have, even as we're having them, through the stories we tell about them. Stories help us make meaning of what's happening. We are made of stories.
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Making Friends With Your Inner Critic
Human beings are complex organisms. I mean, I don't know when the last time was that you tried to design a self-aware, interactive, embodied consciousness with the capacity to to learn and evolve and alter its environment, but it's not easy. You're bound to wind up with some parts that seem a little dysfunctional.
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Follow the Absurd
Some things about you set you apart. There are ways you don't fit in, beliefs and behaviors of yours that are outrageous, ways the world is that have never made sense to you. If you pay attention to these parts, let them lead the way, they will show you how to become powerful.
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Living an Off-Trail Life
Do you live your life on-trail, or off-trail? Trails, roads, and paths make it easier to get from place to place, but only if you want to limit the places you go to the places the trail goes. To gain access to the rest of the world, however, you need to step off the trail, to strike out on your own, to explore.
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Slowly Approach the Object of Fear
There is a formula for overcoming fear. In the world of counseling, applying any formula is always an art form, as no two people or situations are alike. Nonetheless, the process of overcoming fears (in forms such as phobias and post-traumatic stress) has been one of the most replicable and scientifically-validated techniques in the entire world of counseling.
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Chilling Out, Freaking Out, and Checking Out
Fear can be overwhelming! When fear becomes too much to handle, you have three options. First, you can check out. Shutting down and dissociating from your body can be a great way to escape an otherwise overwhelming experience. Second, you can freak out. When fear fills the body to the point of overflowing, then shaking, screaming, and otherwise expressing the fear helps get the energy moving. Third, you can chill out. Calming your system down, breathing, and diffusing the emotion makes the unbearable bearable.
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Exercising Will
How's your strength of will? Without a healthy will, challenges may be impossible to overcome, getting the motivation to start anything new is difficult, and momentum never seems to build.
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Depression as a Path to Liberation
It's easy to lose the path to liberation. How can you ever find it again if you're busy walking another path in a different direction? Luckily, some disturbances in our lives stop us in our tracks, prevent us from continuing down a path that we have learned to walk, but which will not lead us to becoming who we are here to become.
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Unconditional Beauty
You are beautiful. You are already completely beautiful. There's nothing that needs to change about your appearance or your body for you to be just right. This is the nature of unconditional beauty.
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Addiction as a Path to Liberation
We are all, consciously or unconsciously, seeking liberation. We all wish to be free of suffering, to be able to be our true, authentic selves, to be able to clearly see things as they really are.
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Occupy Your Body
How much of your time do you spend in your body, and how much in your head? In our current cultural climate, it's easy to live a life of the mind and leave your body behind. Losing your body, however, is just as bad as losing your mind, negatively impacting your health and well-being, your relationships, and your overall aliveness.
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The Art of Meta-Conversation
I'm really only writing this text introduction to get you to click play on the video below. My goal is to capture your interest enough that you'll watch the video, but without giving away so much of the content that the video will seem redundant. Why am I telling you all this? Because it's all part of the art of meta-conversation.
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Friendship 2.0
There is more than one kind of friendship. The standard model of friendship consists of sharing interests and doing things together, enjoying companionship and caring about each other and providing support. When they first invented friendship, this seemed like some pretty good stuff. That's until the upgrade came along.
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The Anti-Manifestation Manifesto
Using only the power of your thoughts, you can wish for anything you want! To go from wishing to getting what you wish for, however, takes more than mere thinking. Have you ever fallen into the manifestation trap, believing that if you think hard enough about what you want, you'll be able to get it without needing to act on your own behalf?
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You Are What You Repeat
What are the things that you do every day, over and over again? Do the things you repeat contribute to you becoming the person you most wish to be? The fabric of your life is composed of these repetitions. Out of what materials are you weaving that fabric?
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How To Be Biased
Admit it; you're biased! Maybe you've learned that as a counselor you're not supposed to have biases, but that's just not possible. If you're alive, you're biased. Since you're going to be biased anyway, you might as well choose how to be biased.
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Teaching Couples To Be Allies
Long before a couple comes to a counselor seeking support, they come to one another seeking support. Without always realizing it, one of the reasons we enter into romantic partnerships in the first place, is to create relationships where we can heal our pasts. Our unconscious, intuitive attempts to heal our pasts lead us into the biggest conflicts in our partnerships.
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It's Hard, Being a Person
Thank god you survived! Given what you've been through, I'm so glad you made it this far so that we could be here together on my blog page! Yes, I'm talking to you. I'm sure you know people who have been through "far worse things than you", but that doesn't mean you should discount or invalidate all of what you had to get through to make it to this point.
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The Witness Meditation
If you are committed to ongoing growth and development, you will want to keep developing your capacity to witness. Witnessing makes you capable of many things that are otherwise impossible, but more importantly, it allows your self-knowledge and self-awareness to grow and deepen.
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Finite and Infinite Coaching
There are at least two kinds of coaching. One could be called finite, the other infinite.
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Triggered
Triggering happens! You're just innocently going about your day, engaged in meaningful, present time activities, when suddenly, BLAM! Your trigger goes off, and your connection with the present is replaced by a state of unconscious reactivity in which you totally confuse the present and the past.
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A Few Degrees Difference
The story of your life is punctuated by big, dramatic changes and transitions. Big changes are hard to miss. As a result, when we want to make change for ourselves, we tend to think the changes have to be dramatic.
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Ending Jealousy Permanently
Part 6: The Loving What Is Project
Part 6: The Loving What Is Project
Ending suffering requires replacing old beliefs and practices with new ones. Along the journey of ending jealousy, we've picked up a few new practices:
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I Love
Which would you prefer: conditional or unconditional love? Though unconditional love is what you ultimately need, once you grasp what unconditional love is about, you may decide you're content to keep your conditions after all. Conditional love seems to be what most of us seek most of the time.
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Ending Jealousy Permanently
Part 5: The Enjoying Aloneness Project
Part 5: The Enjoying Aloneness Project
Loneliness is some hard core business. Codependency can be a helpful protection against feelings of loneliness, but it has some unfortunate side effects. When your sense of self is merged with another person, any break in connection with them can feel intolerable. If instead, you know how to enjoy being alone, then aloneness (part of our fundamental nature) no longer equals loneliness (the sense of desperation that happens when interpersonal needs go unmet). When you enjoy aloneness, a break in connection just means you get to enjoy some time with yourself!
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Ending Jealousy Permanently
Part 4: The Deepening Intimacy Project
Part 4: The Deepening Intimacy Project
We fear there will not be enough love for us. Belief in the scarcity of intimacy has self-fulfilling consequences. Out of fear of loss, we cling to the few intimate relationships we've managed to find. Clinging, we fail to create intimacy everywhere, but only such an abundance of intimacy can ease our fears.
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Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
Feeling uncomfortable can be an integral part of healing, growth, and liberation! In our work on ourselves, and in our work with the people we counsel, when someone starts to get uncomfortable, you know something important is happening. The discomfort can be like a big, flashing, neon arrow saying, "Put some attention HERE!"
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Ending Jealousy Permanently
Part 3: The Loving Yourself Project
Part 3: The Loving Yourself Project
Insecurity is learned. We internalize the belief that we are inadequate and act on it by being hard on ourselves. Like all the structures of meaning that keep suffering in place, it can be dismantled and replaced with something better.
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Ending Jealousy Permanently
Part 2: Deconstructing Suffering
Part 2: Deconstructing Suffering
If you stop using the word "jealousy", and instead pay close attention to what's actually happening underneath the label, what do you notice? This is not an easy question to answer. Most of us, most of the time, make great efforts to keep from paying close attention to our experience of suffering. It takes a kind of mad curiosity about your own experience to really notice what's going on.
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Ending Jealousy Permanently
Part 1: Naming Is Framing
Part 1: Naming Is Framing
How would you like to no longer experience jealousy? Impossible, you say? How can we ever be free of our basic human emotions, you ask? Well, we can't. Fortunately, jealousy is not a basic human emotion. Jealousy is a complex experience which you play an active part in constructing out of the raw materials of your circumstances, body sensations, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors. If you organize those materials in new ways, instead of producing jealousy, you can create far more desirable experiences.
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How To Be Attractive
You are more attractive than you think you are! All of us could use to rethink just what "attractive" means. Did you grow up learning that some people are just attractive and others just aren't? That's the first idea that needs to go.
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The Life Cycle of Relationships
Have you ever been in a relationship that's ended? My guess is that your answer is yes. If so, congratulations. When relationships complete their natural life cycle, the appropriate thing for them to do is end. Well done.
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Don't Fix Anything
When someone is hurting or struggling and they want your help, your impulse may be to go for the quick fix, to offer up some advice or to try to solve their problem. It's natural to want to fix what's wrong, to make it feel better, to make it go away, and this is why one of the most basic instructions I give to my counseling students is, "Don't fix anything."
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The Ecology of Rest
How much do you let yourself rest? Is it as much as you need? Because we learn to value ourselves on the basis of our productivity, we tend to get less than the ideal quantity of rest. Much of the rest we do get is not quality rest.
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Making Friends with Your Clients
Counseling is an unusual kind of relationship. Though it shouldn't be, it's rare for people to develop relationships that are dedicated to their healing, their growth, and their liberation. Such change-promoting relationships have their own kind of ecology, different from that of typical friendships.
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The Easiest Way
Water flowing downhill. Electricity flowing through the neural network in your brain. Your behavior flowing through your social and cultural landscape. All follow the easiest path they can find. Because we always do things the easiest way possible, bringing about desirable changes in our behavior can only happen when we alter the landscape to make a new way of doing things easier than the old way.
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States, Stages, and Peak Experiences
Some experiences, no matter how beautiful, novel, or exciting, are still just experiences. They are to be enjoyed for their own sake, and once they pass, they remain primarily as beautiful, novel, or exciting memories.
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Feeling Stuck? Try Enlightenment!
In ancient times, only society's elite had access to certain resources. You had to be royalty, or the equivalent, to own a cell phone or participate in higher education. Now that an ever-growing percentage of the population has cell phones and goes to college, communication and education are becoming available to everyone, and our cultural communities are evolving as a result.
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Discharging Fear
There's something you're afraid to do, but you're going to do it anyway. How will you keep that overwhelming feeling of fear from stopping you?
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Courage Makes You Safer
Everybody gets scared. What are you most scared of?
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Crossing the Gap
Everyone is trying to make the journey from the life they were given to the life they dream could be possible for themselves.
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