Pain offers the difficult blessing of causing one’s world to slow to a centered simplicity, as in, “Let’s see if I can manage to lie down without crying.”

“If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while … and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living.” 

Grief and gratitude go hand in hand. Knowing sorrow aligns your heart with gratitude.

When we stop, the rest of Life that we normally rush through comes into focus. We notice things we overlook, things we don’t stop to appreciate — until we slow down. 

Before we zoom over Thanksgiving on our way to Christmas/New Years/Spring Break/Next Summer, I would like to pause to consider the most basic and greatest of gratitudes: the privilege of being here at all.

The same fire that destroys life and darkens the landscape is also what stimulates the opening and growth of new life.

In the dark times of nothingness the ego begins to dissolve and the soul stirs and deepens. In the dark times we refine who we really are: what we value and what we truly want.

I recently read a thought provoking essay about success. The writer — a psychologist, author, and well-known speaker — enumerated his personal definitions of success, a list that, remarkably, had absolutely nothing to do with work, status, or wealth.

The night sea passage is the dark, liminal space between one chapter and another. A booze cruise it is not.

One of my favorite quotes, torn and taped to my desk, is this one, attributed to Joseph Campbell: “We must be willing to let go of the life we have planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.”

We are always doing our best with what we have, what we know and who we are. Discontent rears its ugly head only when we forget this simple truth.

Here’s a holiday pop quiz: Do you remember what you received for Christmas last year? Do you remember what you gave? Me either.

Loneliness is epidemic in our culture. It occurs, as often as not, when we feel unable to express our true selves, or feel we are not understood or seen.

Civility suffers in a fast-moving, perpetually preoccupied and self-centered society. In fact, civility cannot exist alongside narcissism: the two are mutually exclusive. And ours is a painfully, often obscenely narcissistic culture.

Everything is meaningful. Important things are being offered all the time — if we but pay attention. 

On the nature of disease, its meanings, and our role in creating it.

The real suffering of life—the unavoidable agonies—are not problems to be solved but experiences to be faced and felt.

Reading through my collegiate musings reminded me of some interesting things: namely, seeing how really very little has changed.

How do we find Soul in a noisy, gadget-gawking, consumption-oriented society that constantly pulls our attention away from our inner life?

Connecting with our soul animates us. Awakening to our soul’s desire we come into our perfection, our truth, our reason for being.