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Yesterday I was driving through the mountains of Central Oregon—with a sick wife and incessantly trilling dog. My dog doesn’t whine, she trills. Finally, exasperatedly, I turned off the highway where there was a bridge crossing a creek, drove up an old, deserted road, pulled up, and found a trail leading into the woods. I…

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…”…

One of the main insights of the great mystics, and one of the essential truths of Integral Recovery is that all suffering comes from identification with surfaces. This is not a dogma that one has to believe or buy, based on what I or anyone else is saying, this is an experiential given that one…

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…

I am working on the last few chunks of the book I am writing on Integral Recovery, and this weekend I wrote a brief bit called the “The Integral Recovery Relapse Prevention Kit.” In this piece, I wrote about the traditional AA wisdom of quickly removing yourself from the scene that is triggering the cravings,…

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 woke up a bit late this morning and noticed that I was feeling reluctant to do my hour’s meditation. I was feeling antsy and was tempted to make some excuse that perhaps I shouldn’t do it today. Actually, there was never a question as to whether I would meditate or not, because that is…

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…

Traditionally, in AA terminology, the transformational event that leads to the willingness to do the work necessary to begin the journey of recovery is called “hitting bottom.” This is when the shame, failure, and suffering caused by using drugs are simply no longer an option, no longer acceptable to the addict. The precipitating transformational motivators…

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…