change therapy

if you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. thanks for visiting!the everyday becomes exquisitely beautiful. the notion of boredom becomes alien and absurd as we naturally soak in the lovely subtleties of the “banal.” josh waitzkin
this quote is from waitzkin’s the art of learning, a book i’ll […]

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the other day i found a little post on resonant enigma’s about reverence. these words here are inspired by this; in fact, it’s a slightly rewritten excerpt of a paper i wrote quite a few years ago in a course on environmental philosophy. here it is:
my great-aunt mathilde had lots of books, but […]

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here, finally, is the continuation of my conversation with jan about spirituality and atheism.
says jan:
well, really, how could mulder [from the X-files] possibly have believed in UFOs? something for which there is no tangible proof. he would have had to believe simply on the basis of … faith. that would be silly.
believe simply on the […]

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in our last conversation about creativity, jeremy from PsyBlogs talks about the difference between “chaotic” and “ordered” creatives and then moves on to discuss creative blocks.
recently, i came across a doctoral thesis in divinity that talks about the connection between chaos, creativity and spirituality. kurt sander from northern kentucky university points out the important […]

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valentine’s day tomorrow. let’s talk about love.
but what kind of love?
we’re all familiar with eros – the heady, emotional high of romance, sexual love and infatuation. it makes the world go round; or, more specifically, it twirls the world in a spin.
agape (pron. ah-gah-pay) is another type of love people often talk about. […]

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some of you have already made the acquaintance of my wonderful friend tina. i’ve rarely met someone so full of fire, fun and creativity.
tina is working on a book project. until about 10 years ago or so, tina couldn’t read. it’s not because she’s stupid. far from it. she just […]

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yesterday i started presenting joyce trebilcot’s dyke ideas, where she talks, among other things, about guilt. the topic yesterday was identity guilt, the type of guilt we can feel for who we are. trebilcot contrasts this with “official guilt”:
what i call official or polite guilt stems from some particular violation of laws or […]

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i just spent a little time reading through joyce trebilcot’s dyke ideas, a “passionate and insightful contribution to lesbian philosophy.”
seeing that a little while ago we had an interesting discussion on guilt here on this blog, her thoughts on “identity guilt” and “official guilt” were particularly interesting.
what i here call identity guilt is implied by […]

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i’m really taking you guys for a ride here. compassion, families, spamming buddhists - and now a little bit of educational research. i guess in my minds it all hangs together: it’s all about how people make a better life for themselves, and a better world for everyone.
so … today we have part […]

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twice in the last few months i spoke about human nature. in the first post, i alluded to the question of whether there is such a thing as human nature. in the second i showed you an essay i once wrote about human nature. if wonder how this hold up against buddhist […]

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need to shake up your brain a bit? play the STORR game - STOp-Reflect-Realize:
what to do: print out a few copies of this page, and then tuck them away in places where you’ll stumble across them in the next week or so. whenever you come across this sheet:
stop - reflect - realize
you can […]

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a few weeks ago i wrote a blog post, the scrunchie challenge, where i felt inspired by a post at monk at work to change a habit.
i said i was going to keep a scrunchie on my wrist for three weeks, to remind me to ground myself whenever i wasn’t experiencing my body enough. […]

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junebugkitty, one of my stumbleupon friends, had some interesting comments on the topic of guilt that we started discussing here a few days ago.
he mentioned the famous milgram experiment, where subjects in a psychological experiment were required to administer electrical shocks to their fellows when told so by an authority. over 50% followed those […]

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i just stumbled across my term paper of my very first counselling class, 17 years ago. here is what i wrote about my view of human nature. i’m sure i could nip and tuck here and there, and would probably use a slightly different writing style - but generally, most of what i […]

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last month, i started a little series on change and transformation, inspired by a post by my blogging friend nancy that asked, how does change occur? that time i talked about the precursors of change – the “rumblings”, so to say, that precede an earthquake.
aaah, but is it an earthquake? is transformation really […]

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