It’s a Beautiful, Beautiful World

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…

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Integral Sainthood

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…

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An Integral Casa Blanca

I was in Boulder, Colorado, two weeks ago. I was there on Integral Recovery business and had the opportunity to meet with Robb Smith, David Riordan, Marco Morelli, and Jeff Salzman. All of these folks are extraordinary individuals in their own right, and are part of the present arising of this Integral wave. Someday they…

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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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San Damiano: More Learnings from Assisi

I am home again, and still in the process of metabolizing and assimilating our sojourn to Europe. Again I am brought back to Assisi… During our stay there (Pam and me), I took a walk to visit the ancient church San Damiano (a church so old it was falling down in Francis’ time) that Francis/Francesco…

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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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Surfaces and Depth – Part 1

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—it is an experiential given that one will…

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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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Surfaces and Depth – Part 2

Again T.S. Eliot: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope. For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith, but the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting. Wait without…

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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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