Practice, Damn It! Practice!

I am writing from the train station in Berlin, nearing the halfway mark in my month long trip to Germany. It seems like I have been gone from Utah much longer than 2 weeks. I have felt lonely at times, but the depths of the experience have more than compensated for the occasional bouts of…

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Confronting the Collective Shadow

I am nearing the end of my almost 4-week journey in Europe. As I write this, I am on a train from Berlin headed for Amsterdam, which will be the last leg of my trip before I fly back to the U.S. in four days. The time has been so rich in connections and learning…

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Depression: My Disease

While most of my work and writing in the last few years has focused on chemical dependency and addiction, my personal struggle and life-threatening illness has been depression. When I say depression, I am not talking about a case of the blues or being bummed out for a bit, but mind-crushing, soul-crushing hell. A pit…

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A Sense of Sin

It seems that lately in my practice (or perhaps it has always been so), as I approach the depths of my being, the inner light, God, what have you, I hit a thick layer of self-loathing, where my failures, imperfections, and neurotic conditioning-or to use the Christian language, my sinful nature or my sins-all become…

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Shadow (Again!)

In a recent conversation with my friend Rabbi Marc Gafni, he said something to the effect that “shadow is the part of your life that you have not lived.” And I thought to myself, “There goes Marc again, a Seven on the Enneagram, putting a happy spin on things.” My current working definition of shadow…

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A Gift from Christmas

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…

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The Addiction Worm

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…

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Deep Ethics and the Gettysburg Address

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…

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Deep Practice and Playing the Blues

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,…

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