Healing is hard work; to this day it is the single hardest thing I have ever done. To face the rage, pain, abandonment and betrayal was an impossible task that was only navigated with a tenuous combination of hope, faith and desire. The flip side is that healing is the gift that keeps on giving,…
Have you ever felt like you were navigating life without a compass, as though there were no absolute bearings any more, only vague signposts? Well I spent most of my teens and twenties in that state, without really knowing what the problem was. Then one night in my early thirties I was sitting in my…
We are destroying the wilderness of the planet at the exact rate, and to the same extent, that we are suppressing the wildness of our own psyches. The human being and the natural environment are inseparable: what we do to one we also do to the other. There are many things that are optional, even…
As children, we all had superheroes who captivated our attention. While I loved to watch Sesame Street and Spiderman cartoons, nothing captured my imagination like the pixie-dust wielding fairy called Tinkerbell. Her allure lay in the fact that she was light and agile; could flit in and out of situations at her whim and will; and…
For me, an event that looms as large and final as death is best framed in existential terms, where the death of a loved one becomes an object of our consciousness, and we become the conscious mind that must wrap itself around this object. Relationships play a fundamental role in the coherence of our psyches,…
When I was twenty-six years old we had a family crisis on the west coast of British Columbia, so I moved there to take full-time care of my niece until the situation sorted itself out. Two months into my stint, my truck insurance was about to expire, and I mentioned to my sister that I…
A long time ago, in a universe far away, I was born into intergenerational trauma. I lived in the dysfunction of this for almost two decades, and then it took me two more to bring myself out of what I like to refer to as “the aftermath.” If you’re wondering what this aftermath looked like,…
One of the things that I learned through my decades of depression is that our bodies are like batteries: they are largely comprised of water and salt, and rely on the sun as their exterior energy source. This phenomenon goes a long way in explaining why we feel so energized after a day at the…
I can’t fail to notice how events like mass shootings continue to capture the public imagination, as though they come out of nowhere and are one-off occurrences. Nor can I fail to notice how each time one occurs, the masses of the citizenry are more than eager to define the perpetrator of such an event…
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls a Butterfly.” – Richard Bach Personal transformation cannot occur while we are busy conforming to a status quo, because deep transformation happens in the wilderness of our psyches, in that place beyond the social programming of our culture. It takes courage to transform,…