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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…

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…

In a previous blog post, I described a beautiful experience I had at St. Francis’ tomb in Assisi. Well, we just started looking at some of the pictures from our trip, and found some really nice ones. Here are just a few of them….

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…

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…

Put your practice first and your sobriety first.  Hanging out with family can often be very challenging, so make sure you have a plan of how you’re going to take care of yourself. I have found that if I ratchet up my meditation practice from 1 hour to 1.5 hours a day while visiting family,…

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…

Something really remarkable happened to me last week, and I’d like to unpack it and see where it takes us. I had the chance to be in the tomb of St. Francis of Assisi. We had just arrived in Assisi and were visiting the Basilica. Somehow, I had gotten it in my head that Francis’…

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…

I wanted to write a few words about the use of binaural brain entrainment technology (specifically Holosync® technology) for enhanced meditation, shadow work, and brain transformation. There seems to be some controversy, albeit small controversy, regarding its use. There’s the argument that goes something like this: Well, Buddha didn’t have Holosync®, which makes using Holosync® seem…