Somewhere along the way, we westerners have wholeheartedly embraced the notion that the holidays are supposed to be about having wonderful, cozy, nurturing and loving times with our families. Holding onto that thought can be depressing. As if all the tension, stress and dysfunctionality that we may have experienced with various members [...]
Self-awareness is the bedrock of all therapy. The degree to which you are self aware will shape everything in your life – your relationships, how you handle challenges and obstacles, how you deal with failure, and whether or not you can rise from the ashes and recreate your life anew. A lack of self-awareness, on [...]
Animals can teach us a lot about relationships. They just seem to handle them so naturally and gracefully, with a minimum of fuss. Not so for we humans. All of life involves relationships of various sorts and they are central to our human lives. They are the alchemical vessels we are cooked in, changed [...]
Going into therapy, finding the right therapist - it's a risk. Why would anyone want to bare their soul to a stranger - does the thought make you feel hugely vulnerable, awkward? Isn't it extremely embarrassing, uncomfortable? Yes it can be, but the more dominant feeling of clients who walk over that bridge is one [...]
I've been thinking about birth and death lately, as someone I know has been approaching death. It struck me the other day how these two big events, between which we live out our lives, have some meaningful opposites. If you think about the soul incarnating into a baby's body, I imagine it would feel terrified [...]
I have tentatively started – yet once again – to write in a journal, inspired by Virginia Woolfe, Anais Nin and even Kierkegaarde. My earliest inspiration for doing do was The Diary of Anne Frank, which I read around the same age she was when she wrote that remarkable book - at the ripe old [...]
A very valuable article on the mother line
The image of this beautiful cow at the Cow's Ball in Bohinj, Slovenia has stayed with me since attending this wonderful local annual festival in Bohinj last September. It is an annual ritual in which the local people celebrate and honour the cows as they bring them down from the high mountain pastures to the [...]
Notice I didn’t say the “successful” introvert. Self-help books abound on how to be successful: The 10 Habits of a Successful Leader, Seven Ways to be an Effective Leader, The 8 Habits of the Self-Made Rich, How to be a Success and Achieve Abundance: 8 Steps to Achieve Your Goals, etc. Frankly,these titles just [...]
James Hillman’s extraordinary book, A Terrible Love of War, examines the phenomena of war in our world in an effort to understand its importance, its inevitability, its impact and its meaning. It is divided into four chapters: War is Normal, War is Inhuman, War is Sublime, and Religion is War. While the first chapter lays [...]
