This Christmas, I found myself at home in Teasdale, Utah with a house (and guest house) full of mostly new faces, one of whom was detoxing off a heavy mix of drugs and alcohol.  Welcome to my world. A new Integral Recovery intensive was in its first week. I had to cancel my almost yearly…

The Worm’s WakingThere is a worm addicted to eating grape leaves.Suddenly, he wakes up,call it Grace, whatever,something wakes him, and he is no longer a worm.He is the entire vineyard, and the orchard too,the fruit, the trunks,a growing wisdom and joythat does not need to devour. This poem by Rumi is so good that it…

For some time now, I’ve been feeling that I should throw my hat in the ring on the subject of ethics. A lot of my ideas and intuitions crystallized around a talk I attended, given by Roger Walsh at the Conference for Integral Theory at JFK University. In my soon-to-be-published book (SUNY Press), I even…

About five months ago, I was at a friend’s house in Salt Lake City, who had started a business buying and selling vintage guitars. I started playing guitar when I was thirteen years old, so I have had a 40-year relationship with the instrument. Somewhere early on, for various reasons that I won’t get into,…

I was recently reading Cynthia Borgeault’s remarkable book The Meaning of Mary Magdalene. In this book, on page 142 to be exact, Cynthia quotes an adage from the early Church fathers: “That which is not lived is not redeemed.” Cynthia paraphrases this  as “That which is not accepted is not transformed.” These sayings hit me hard…

Dear Integral Friends and Family, I hesitated a few days before posting this. I felt that the tone was too preachy and righteous and didn’t take into account Genpo’s suffering and the responsibility of the other adults involved. And, when I chuck rocks, I am well aware of Jesus’ injunction, “He that is without sin…”…

Recently, I have been experiencing a period of deep sadness. It is different from the crippling depressions I have experienced in the past, when it felt like I was trying to walk and think surrounded by mud; my body, mind, and emotions so weighted down that I could hardly move, think, or feel. What I…

For the last few months, our meditation group, which has been meeting together on Sundays for the last 13 years, has been reading through the Gospel of Thomas, following our 40-minute meditation. Initially, we were reading five verses at a time, but we found that the verses were so deep, and often challenging, that now…

I wanted to share a powerful experience that I had in meditation the other day. I was using the iAwake Special Edition Digital Euphoria track and I was in a profound state of contemplative prayer, or resting in the presence, as I have begun to call it. Paul Smith, author of Integral Christianity, calls it the…

Transcribed from iAwake’s weekly, free teleconference call on July 25, 2012. I was recently in the Bay Area to teach a class on Addiction Studies. When my class and I did our first meditation together, we sank into a very deep meditative state, one which we could all really feel. When you meditate in a…