May 8, 2014 By Admin

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Spirit Wars and “Spiritual Warfare” This post will discuss the topic and personal strategies. Most content will relate to both physical realities and metaphorical meanings and categories. Since a person viewing their self as fighting a spiritual war most likely holds onto certain parts of self in this endeavor, it is highly unlikely that the […]

The Tao of Nature I have two interesting stories about nesting robins. These stories tell of the bonds of birds and their young, and how intelligent these birds can be. The first story happened to me abut 15 years ago. The second story happened today, July 27, 2017. Story 1 I was working in […]

Secular Meditation and Addictions Treatment Today we have ample research evidence (NIH, NIDA, SAMHSA, etc.) that mindfulness, meditation, yoga, and mind training all have some effectiveness in improving addiction disorders. In recent meta-analyses the primary effect was through improved emotion regulations, whereas there was a more direct positive impact on chronic pain, depression, and anxiety. […]

Mindfulness, Movement, and Meditation Practices Meditation Master Thich Nhat Hanh offers some of the most helpful mindfulness, movement, and meditation instructions available today. His themes here are about reducing your suffering, increasing your satisfactions, and expanding your happiness as a result. Please do not note that “I do not have time to do these things!” […]

Trauma Informed Care – The Absolute Basics This post aims at providing a very basic introduction to Trauma Informed Care. Advanced versions of this information are available from the author. So what is Trauma Informed Care (hereafter TIC)? Below I have listed rationales of need and core characteristics of TIC in organizations. Why We Need […]

Expanded Information about Your Compassion Practices and Benefits Compassion Practice Tips and Exercises The Buddha noted that one should not dwell on the past, become too attached to future outcomes, but instead concentrate our mind only on the present moment of our experiences. The Dalai Lama noted that compassion is a necessary condition for inner […]

Pursuit of Happiness – Mindful Happiness Gilbert, a professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of Stumbling on Happiness, implies that we make mind-errors in our search for happiness. Happiness is a core human emotion, most often activated into consciousness via the midbrain reward centers and dopamine activation. Perhaps our hardwired brains are made to […]

Mindfulness Practices to help Reduce Your Worry & Suffering My last post dealt with various mindfulness-based practices and skills that may help to reduce created suffering due to excessive worrying. I will add a few more practices in this post. First, let us go back to Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and his Meditations. In Book 2, page 14 […]

Mindfulness Practices for Expanding Acceptance Mindfulness and contemplation can be great allies in our struggle to better understand each other. This is especially true when it comes to matters of interpersonal relationships and highly significant relationships. It is also important in diversity, or as some now refer to it – variation in human beings. Variation may […]

From The Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation We humans have a unique way of perceiving and processing emotional experiences. Years ago I developed a formula to understand the perception and process of emotional experiences: CABS-VAKGO-IS/Rels. The C stands for cognition; we spend a great deal of time thinking about pretty much everything we […]

Helper Self-Care is Important In the most current issue of The National Psychologist (July-August, 2019) an article linked helper effectiveness, risk management, and clinical outcomes to helper self-care. To make a long story shorter, I will simply paraphrase and re-word the suggestions. These recommendations support YOUR emotional survival and successful risk management as a helper as […]

Improving Your Self-Esteem – An Action Contemplation The UCLA Higher Education Research Institute’s surveys and V. Mamgain’s ideas about neoclassical economics of happiness help provide a means to deconstruct improved learning in higher education and also personal happiness in the process. According to the UCLA research surveys, higher education students want more spirituality and personal […]

Calming Your Self-Critical Self with Mindfulness A core problem for many people is their incessant self (or other) criticism. This is a major part of our psychological mind suffering today. In the past life for most people was more difficult, so human basic needs were the energized priorities; today so many of us have been […]

My third posting on self-medication- Comes from the Eleanor R. Liebman Center for Secular Meditation in Monkton, Vermont. Now we will turn our attention to how people become habituated to self-medication to obtain brief moments of joy and/or to avoid emotional suffering. Recall that self-medication becomes a habit (dopamine released in reward centers of the […]

Behaviors People Display When in Groups After more than 35 years of facilitating hundreds of classes, workshops, family therapy sessions, group therapy sessions, and work project groups it has become clear that we do some strange things when we participate in groups. It appears to me that many of these in-group functions serve both ego […]

A Radical Feminist in her Time Over 800 years ago Hildegard of Bingen presented radical viewpoints on women-power and male-dominance in the Christian Church, stone/gem healing, meditation, insight and intellect, the web of life or planetary oneness, being in nature, environmentalism, and personal stories of suffering, etc. Despite her outspoken manner and her popularity among […]

Poem on the Wind I am quite pleased with my experience on BEING in the wind today. This poem will suggest that you allow the wind to be a metaphor – even a fantasy – that allows your pain and suffering to be swept away by the endless, gentle, blowing wind of nature. We […]

Cognitive Defusion in Mindfulness Psychotherapy A well-meaning therapist might ask: What is cognitive defusion. Well this practice, as used in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, is beyond cognitive restructuring of cognitive distortions and automatic negative thoughts ( I call “Red Ants”). The practice concretely de-literalizes the personal truth and meaning of unhelpful, repetitive thoughts and words. […]

Helping Professions and Emotional Balance Helping professions must practice to achieve emotional balance. Working conditions for the helping professions have become more and more difficult over time, especially with the advent of so called “helpful technologies” and ever-increasing governmental/funding requirements for documentation. When I started in the (behavioral health) field of clinical psychology and addictions […]

How We Make Habits – An Understanding Twenty-five hundred years ago the Buddha reportedly taught how humans make habits. The insights of this earliest Buddhist Psychology sheds shame on the West, with its almost-the-same version of this view in the 20th century. One must wonder if B. F. Skinner or N. Chomsky knew about Buddhist […]