Lately, I have been passing on a little pointer to my students in private practice: I have been inviting them to keep a mantra each day that says, “Good enough!”

More specifically:

Good enough for this white (or black, asian, aboriginal, etc.) girl (or boy or ___) who kinda thinks she/he is all that.

We all have a good amount of “I’m not worthy” running us ragged every day. That belief is tucked down in the depths of our being, but up on the surface we have a lot of striving energy – usually striving to get it right, or more specifically, to get it perfect.

This “I’m not worthy” belief creates stories that hook us into a mad insanity. There are stories about how our actions are causing other people strife, otherwise known as guilt. And there are heavier stories about how our very being is harmful to others, otherwise known as shame. So, guilt and shame are both coming from our deep subconscious belief that we are in fact “not worthy,” and the surface activity of our lives is filled with striving so we can measure up to some semblance of perfection.Continue reading…

When we are in pain, suffering, and stuck against some vicious patterns, the grace in this is that we must act.

Finally, we have to risk change. Perhaps we dare to pray, or find other ways to ask for help. And then we find inspiration, insight, a teacher, a coach… life offers up a path. We find a path to peace that in some way makes sense to us. In some way, it speaks to us about transformation, aliveness, change. We can see the path we need to take to move forward.

Maybe – if we are really available, really ready – we will get precise, practical, step-by-step instructions. And we find there is a natural inspiration to follow those steps.

And then we take a step, and it feels good. We take another, and it feels really good. We run a little down the path, feel some spaciousness, some ease, something softer against our broken, wounded places. We are sure this is the way forward. We may even come off a little self-righteous in our certainty that this is the way forward.
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The solution to stress, anxiety and heartbreak is being conscious

It was hard to watch the news this week, to read about everything going on in the world. It was hard to stay connected, listening, and loving. It was hard to have a tender heart and an alive intelligence. Maybe it’s been like that for awhile for you. Maybe you, like me, have offered up money, time, energy, your voice… you’ve signed petitions, you’ve marched in marches… and it feels like all your activity is going nowhere. Occasionally you want to admit that no matter what you do, it all feels impotent. This can leave you feeling powerless and somewhat devastated.

But we can remember that we have a deeper, real power at our disposal. This power comes not from our actions, but from our awareness – the awareness of our dreaming.

Consider the dreams we have every night. We get emotionally hooked by the storyline of our dreams when we’re asleep and unaware that we’re dreaming. But if you happen to realize while dreaming that you are in fact in the middle of a dream, everything changes in an instant. Becoming conscious that you are dreaming means you are no longer at the mercy of your unconscious mind. The fear, anxiety, and the frustration no longer own the narrative. With such lucid dreaming, it is sometimes possible to then influence the direction of the dream’s storyline, but the true power is to simply recognize that you’re dreaming. If this little miracle happens to you, your dreams become conscious – connected to your heart, instead of your unconscious mind – and will often suddenly turn playful or insightful.
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Romantic relationships can be wonderful to experience, but they also have a way of putting us through hell. What makes them so painful? And how can we create a more conscious relationship so that we can find them less challenging?

Ultimately, I think most of the pain in romantic relationships comes from the battle of living with attachment to one’s painful deep wounds of trying to be someone worthy of love, versus just loving what is. We really run into problems when we sacrifice our authentic expression for the sake of not creating a rift with a loved one. We feel a pressure inside ourselves — sometimes very low grade, sometimes very intense — to present ourselves as “easy,” “loving,” or what our partner wants us to be, so we can be loved and not rejected. But the truth is that we cannot shape ourselves in a way that is uniformly awesome to our mates.

We are all very different, and the old “Mars vs Venus” challenges affect us all. We each inhabit a spot on masculine-feminine spectrum, and sexual magnetism comes from the polarity between where you are on that spectrum and where your mate is. And your particular position on that spectrum defines a way you speak, think, and interact within a relationship.

In general, over on the masculine side of the spectrum, people tend to let their actions speak — they are motor-skills based. Moving around space is their basic fluency, and therefore action speaks volumes to them. But over on the feminine side of the spectrum, people are relationship-based. Their fluency is reading all that a person is communicating, regardless of whether it is being communicated consciously or unconsciously.Continue reading…

What do you really want to do with your life?

At some point in our lives, we all wonder what we’re doing here. Growing up, most of us feel like we’re supposed to find some deep calling within us that will automatically lead us to be successful, happy adults.

But as adults, most of us still struggle with this same conundrum. So let’s take a closer look.

In non-dual spiritual teachings, there is an experience we call Being: having your senses connected to the present moment, with the simplicity of being focused on those senses, instead of all the mental thoughts or swirling emotions. And when you are really standing in the present moment—in the ground of Being—you can notice that it has a will; a direction that isn’t influenced by those thoughts or emotions.

This direction appears with much less effort than the directional pull of the mind, because ego’s direction has so much force in comparison. And if you listen close to this impulse, you will see that it also feels sweet, like there is a natural desire to be moved by this direction. But to most people, this impulse is very subtle.Continue reading…

There’s a recent article in the New York Times titled Let’s Ban Porn, which reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote:

There is no such thing as moral or immoral books. There are well written or badly written, that is all.”
—Oscar Wilde

I came of age in a feminist community in the far northern regions of Canada. We rejoiced in sexual freedoms, and I learned that it was important to take politics out of the bedroom to be truly free. I learned that I needed to own my sexual desires and that I was responsible for knowing what turned me on and what turned me off. I was handed a copy of Betty Dobson’s Sex for One at 21 years old, which ushered in a deep inhabiting of my sexuality, as it has done for countless women since it was first published. I read books like Cunt, and The Vagina Coloring Book. And I was, and still am, a disciple of Annie Sprinkle—the prostitute turned porn star turned performance artist—who is a queen of sexual consent and liberation. These influences taught me that pleasure was my responsibility.

And porn has played a part in that. But it was well-crafted porn, like really good erotic fiction, poetry, and film making. These were educational tools, places to be exposed to human bodies and various desires and tastes, and to discover what a turn-on was. But I have since realized mine was a rarefied education.

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