Sacred Mirror Counseling

05/10/2022

This is awesome: "I want you to run far and fast if your therapist isn’t continually pointing out the dehumanizing systems we’re all living within that are designed to cause depression, oppression, isolation, violence, and suicidality. If you’re climate-crisis and collapse aware, and your therapist isn’t talking to you directly about what’s happening in these realms, or downplays your grief, holy outrage, despair, and fear, get the f**k out of there—gaslighting is never a healing intervention." I heartily endorse this rant.

I blame mainstream Western psychology for a lot of the neoliberal bu****it we’re all inundated with. As I’ve gone further into the field of psychology (I have a Masters in counseling psychology and work with therapy clients regularly), I’ve come to see it as mostly individualized, white-center...

05/08/2022

This is pretty close to what I meant by Climate Grief when I wrote a book about it in 2015: "Perhaps the American Psychiatric Association is correct to turn prolonged grief into an illness and to cite the multiplicity of world-historical calamities to support this claim. Not because the diagnosis will lead to finding errant brain circuits to treat but because, as the links in the supply chain of our familiar world weaken and snap, we may need to be reminded that behind the outrage and blame is bereavement, that we may be entering a long age of grief and we have no one to console us for our losses or to build something new with, except one another."

We are grieving the loss of the familiar.

05/06/2022

“The Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert talk about the two "hungers". There is the Great Hunger and there is the Little Hunger. The Little Hunger wants food for the belly; but the Great Hunger, the greatest hunger of all, is the hunger for meaning...
There is ultimately only one thing that makes human beings deeply and profoundly bitter, and that is to have thrust upon them a life without meaning.
There is nothing wrong in searching for happiness. But of far more comfort to the soul is something greater than happiness or unhappiness, and that is meaning. Because meaning transfigures all. Once what you are doing has for you meaning, it is irrelevant whether you're happy or unhappy. You are content - you are not alone in your Spirit - you belong.”

Laurens van der Post

Photograph of Sir Laurens Van Der Post, with a Bushman in the Kalahari Desert.

03/14/2022

Beautiful, you are.

Some people imagine the word “soul” to be a New Age term, a lazy woo-woo concept favored by fuzzy thinkers on the Left Coast. As evidence that's not the case, I offer references to “soul” by writers who don’t fit those descriptions, starting with Emily Dickinson:

The Soul should always stand ajar
That if the Heaven inquire
He will not be obliged to wait
Or shy of troubling Her
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I am the poet of the body,
And I am the poet of the soul.
The pleasures of heaven are with me, and the pains of
hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself—the latter I
translate into a new tongue.

—Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
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How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies; how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls!

–Henry David Thoreau, “Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau”
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This earth is honey for all beings, and all beings are honey for this earth. The intelligent, immortal being, the soul of the earth, and the intelligent, immortal being, the soul in the individual being—each is honey to the other.

—Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
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Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

—author Oscar Wilde
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"There is a saying that when the student is ready, the teacher appears," writes Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

But the magic of that formula may not unfold with smooth simplicity, she says: "The teacher comes when the soul, not the ego, is ready. The teacher comes when the soul calls, and thank goodness—for the ego is never fully ready."
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Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.

—artist Pablo Picasso.
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"The works must be conceived with fire in the soul but executed with clinical coolness," wrote the painter Joan Miró in describing his artistic process.
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"Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul," wrote environmentalist Edward Abbey.
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Soul is the place,
stretched like a surface of millstone grit between
body and mind,
where such necessity grinds itself out

—Anne Carson, winner of the MacArthur “genius” award and a Guggenheim Fellowship, excerpt from “The Glass Essay”
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The words "passive" and "passion" come from the same Latin root, pati, which means "to endure." Waiting is thus both passive and passionate. It's a vibrant, contemplative work. It involves listening to disinherited voices within, facing the wounded holes in the soul, the denied and undiscovered, the places one lives falsely.

—author Sue Monk Kidd
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"Each person is a story that the Soul of the World wants to tell to itself," writes storyteller Michael Meade.

(PS: What does that Soul want to say through you?)
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The soul moves in circles.

—philosopher Plotinus.
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Sensual pleasure passes and vanishes, but the friendship between us, the mutual confidence, the delight of the heart, the enchantment of the soul, these things do not perish and can never be destroyed.

—philosopher Voltaire in a letter to his partner Marie Louise Denis
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You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.

—author Albert Camus
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I note the echo that each thing produces as it strikes my soul.

—author Stendhal
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Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, human beings would rot away in their greatest passion, idleness.

—psychologist Carl Jung
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Nobel Prize-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska wrote a poem called “A Few Words On the Soul”:

We have a soul at times.
No one’s got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood’s fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It’s picky:
it doesn’t like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren’t two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we’re sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won’t say where it comes from
or when it’s taking off again,
though it’s clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.
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I am not lazy.
I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.

–Anne Sexton, from “Frenzy”
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Let your verse be what goes soaring, sighing,
Set free, fleeing from the soul gone flying
Off to other skies and loves, wherever.
Let your verse be aimless chance, delighting
In good-omened fortune, sprinkled over
Dawn’s wind, bristling scents of mint, thyme, clover …
All the rest is nothing more than writing.

– Paul Verlaine, from “Ars Poetica”, trans. Norman R. Shapiro
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I made my soul familiar—with her extremity—
That at the last, it should not be a novel Agony

—Emily Dickinson
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I have a lot of work to do today;
I need to slaughter memory,
Turn my living soul to stone
Then teach myself to live again

- Anna Akhmatova, “The Complete Poems”
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I am not quick moving. I have to wait for myself — it is always late before the water comes to light out of the well of my self, and I often have to endure thirst for longer than I have patience. That is why I go into solitude — so as not to drink out of everybody’s cistern.

When I am among the many I live as the many do, and I do not think as I really think; after a time it always seems as though they want to banish me from myself and rob me of my soul — and I grow angry with everybody and fear everybody. I then require the desert, so as to grow good again.

— Friedrich Nietzsche
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Art by Elena Kotliarker

08/26/2021

5-MeO-DMT, the so-called "God Molecule," allows one to experience psycho-spiritual death (not NDE, as is often misrepresented) in a 15-minute experience that is not even, really, psychedelic. It's just a chance to see the way the universe actually is. Non-temporal, non-spatial being-ness. Just like waking from a dream...
I think anyone would benefit from such an experience -
don't you?
Imagine what your life would be like if you no longer had any fear of death. For that matter, imagine what the world would be like if nobody feared death.
"You may say I'm a dreamer... but I'm not the only one."

Indeed, experiencing the transcendence of your physical identification, with the certain knowledge that your essence, your spiritual core, your soul, persists beyond the boundary of bodily death is, without doubt, the most precious gift that psychedelic experiences can provide. This was the gift vouchsafed in the mystery religions of ancient civilizations, where initiates went through an experience of death and rebirth, in which they were provided an experiential preparation for death & a vision of the reality of the spiritual worlds beyond.
– R Metzner

Featured art: Dying
1990
Oil on Linen
60 x 44 inches

07/27/2020

The basis for my developing theory of eco-entrainment: The central thesis of the shared resonance theory of consciousness is this: the particular linkages that allow for large-scale consciousness – like those humans and other mammals enjoy – result from a shared resonance among many smaller constituents. The speed of the resonant waves that are present is the limiting factor that determines the size of each conscious entity in each moment. As a particular shared resonance expands to more and more constituents, the new conscious entity that results from this resonance and combination grows larger and more complex. The Earth behaves like a gigantic electric circuit. Its electromagnetic field surrounds and protects all living things with a natural frequency pulsation of 7.83 hertz on average — the so-called “Schumann resonance,” named after physicist Dr. Winfried Otto Schumann, who predicted it mathematically in 1952. That frequency lies near the upper limits of the theta range of brainwaves that are associated with meditation, intuition and memory.

07/09/2020

05/09/2020

Our old world has ended. A new one has not yet bloomed. Here we are, together in the bardo, suffering from the illusion of separateness. As Pema Khandro likes to say, we are all confused buddhas...

Buddha Dharma Editor Tynette's Letter from the LionsRoar Weekend Reader...

BLOOMING IN THE BARDO As I write this, I’m in week seven of “self-isolation” with my husband and teenage son, doing my part to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Just over two weeks ago, a gunman was shot down thirty minutes from my home, after a killing spree that left twenty-two people dead, the worst mass shooting in Canadian history. Yesterday, it snowed, covering the green grass and spring flowers.

Nothing is as it should be. The world has been turned upside down.

Like you, perhaps, I’m trying to make sense of this moment. In my search for answers, I’ve turned to the teachings we’ve published in Buddhadharma over the past eighteen years, eager to find the missing pieces of what feels like a challenging puzzle. As I comb through back issues, I find myself gravitating to one word in particular: “bardo.”

In her article “Breaking Open in the Bardo,” Pema Khandro Rinpoche describes the bardo as “that state in which we have lost our old reality” and don’t yet know what our new reality might be. It arises from a disruption, or rupture, in our old way of seeing and being, and brings with it a sense of groundlessness and uncertainty. Our instinct is to fill in the story as quickly as we can so that we can hold on to some sense of self and continuity in our lives. But when the rupture is big, we’re unable to.

In “Koans for Troubled Times,” Joan Sutherland talks about the things that come to “fetch us” — “the cook coughs or the morning star rises, and we fall open.” It doesn’t matter whether we consider these moments good, bad or indifferent. Everything, Sutherland, reminds us, is the Way: “There are no detours from the Way; we can’t lose our Way. To engage and entangle ourselves with whomever and whatever we meet, to care about them, to throw our lot in with them — that is the Way.”

Whether you’ve been broken open or fetched, chances are you too feel the ground trembling beneath you. What if we were to meet this moment fully?

In “Steadfast in the Midst of Samsara,” Shinshu Roberts points out that bodhisattvas grow strong in the midst of difficulty, and we are no different: “We are the very same bodhisattvas; we too bloom in fire. Without the fire, blooming cannot happen — without difficulty, we cannot respond with realized action.”

Is it possible that collectively we might emerge from this bardo with a sense of blooming?

Time will tell. Likely it will depend at least in part on how we choose to engage with this uncertain time. If we rail against it and cling to the vestiges of what we’ve previously known, we may miss an opportunity to find solutions to some of the pernicious social and environmental problems we’ve contributed to. If we shore up our sense of self and resist the gap that this bardo affords, we may never know what we’re truly capable of. Yet if we choose to be brave and allow grief, fear, and love to tenderize and expand our hearts and minds, we might come closer to understanding and integrating the Buddha’s teachings.

Whatever response we choose, we won’t be alone, even when we might think we are. As Shinshu Roberts explains, “We are dependent on the effort of every being and thing, and in this way are supported in ways we cannot see or know. All around us, the world is making its effort to meet ours, just as we meet its effort. We are in this together with all beings throughout time and space, making the world.”

—Tynette Deveaux, editor, Buddhadharma

It’s when we lose the illusion of control—a "bardo" state where we are most vulnerable and exposed—that we can discover the creative potential of our lives.

02/01/2020

Umm... Ommm... Aahhhh...

Eight weeks to a better brain. Test subjects taking part in an 8-week program of mindfulness meditation showed results that astonish...