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Video Summary: Today, I want to talk about spiritual discipline, as you would use it in a spiritual practice. If you've been studying spirituality for a while, at some point, a spiritual or meditation teacher, yoga instructor, or book may have suggested having a spiritual practice. I have found this to be beneficial for a couple of reasons. When we do something that connects us with our spiritual nature and to the universe, it gives us this point of reference as we go through

Video Summary: I was at a spiritual retreat given by the spiritual teacher, Adyashanti, about five years ago. Somehow, when you're in retreat, the spiritual truths get in at a deeper level. Somewhere around day three or four, Adyashanti spoke about all spiritual teachings being either ascending or descending in nature. Adyashanti describes the ascending energy as awakening energy. It ascends out from us. In a spiritual awakening, we’re breaking out of our box, moving beyond t

Video Summary: I want to talk about authority in the sense of where we look for direction in our lives. Where do we look for decisions and how to live our lives? My observation is that we tend to look for authority outside of ourselves. In our culture, authority is often a relational thing that gets established between people. So relationships have degrees of authority. We learned this at a young age, ultimately from our parents and other adults, such as teachers and coaches.

Video Summary: You’ve probably experienced both sides of judgment: judging others and being judged. Today, I want to focus on us judging others. Judgment, in the context of this video, is projecting something that you're not able to accept about yourself or the world onto a person, situation, or group of people. Most of you watching this video probably notice times when you judge other people. And cool for you, that's not an easy thing to accept in yourself. You're owning som

Video Summary: Individuation is a concept that Carl Jung brought to us. Here, I’m using individuation to refer to when we're making something ours. During the development of the independent personality, which begins at six or seven years old, we're primarily learning things by watching what our parents, teachers, and coaches do. And then somewhere in adolescence and then into early adulthood, we start finding our own way to do things. We might say, “My dad did it this way, bu

Video Summary: I want to talk about personal ethics. My premise is that our ethics are personal in that they're specific to us. And not only that, they're specific to how we are right now. My ethics are different now than they were 20 years ago, or even five years ago. The first way this shows is that expecting another person to have the same ethics as you do is unrealistic. Our Judeo-Christian culture sees ethics in an absolute, right-and-wrong way. What’s really going on is

Video Summary: I think everyone, in one sense or another, has had dreams in their life that they were really passionate about. It could have been when you were a little kid wanting to be an astronaut or a princess. It could be later in adolescence, in college, or in the early twenties. It's this thing that you were fired up about, and there was a lot of fire in your belly around it. It could have been music, art, social activism, dancing, or sports. Maybe you were on a really

Video Summary: One of the things I prescribe to my clients in sharing circles, sessions, and retreats is a practice I call matching investment. The idea is to naturally interact with someone, notice the level of energy and investment that comes back from them, and then match it. By investment, I mean an investment of energy, time, money, commitment, and caring. These qualities require emotional energy. We work hard to generate and invest this precious energy, and we only get

Video Summary: I just gave a talk on the Aboriginal Dreamtime, shamanic ceremony, and the spring equinox. It was a free introduction on Zoom for the Spring Equinox retreat that I'm going to facilitate in the Ashland, Oregon area, March 23rd through the 26th, here in a couple of months. I'm really excited about it, and the people who participated were excited about it, which made it even better. And more importantly, they asked some really cool questions. And it's always when

Video Summary: Intuitive learning is the learning of the body. This becomes useful as we start going through life with an open heart, allowing ourselves to feel and trust our intuition. With intuitive learning, the body is learning by getting a feel for it rather than learning with our intellect. We were conditioned in grade school to learn through intellectual learning. Unless we were learning to play a musical instrument, in the woodshop, or figuring things out, we weren't

Video Summary: Another aspect of this time of introspection over the winter is that it's a really opportune time for healing. When our heart is open, and we're allowing energy in, we may get triggered or spun out. We go into our stuff. We may get angry, scared, reactionary, or judgmental. You could think of it as we're allowing energy in, and it hits a wound. When someone says or does something that hurts our feelings, rubs us the wrong way, or offends us, it may be an indica

About 30 years ago, we gathered to do a ceremony during the Summer Solstice. We often begin such retreats sitting around the fire, doing a sharing circle, pondering such questions as, What's in your heart? What have you been experiencing? Or, what are you hoping to awaken during this retreat? At this gathering, however, our teacher just looked at us and said, "This year I want to know something different. What do you bring to ceremony this year?" We were a bit taken aback as