I'm no Rousseau. I do not believe that man in nature is inherently kind or fundamentally good and that it is simply society that corrupts and creates evil. Have you taken a look around at what nature does? It's not just butterflies and watercolor sunsets. Nature is deadly snake bites and decaying corpses, violent hurricanes and ferocious…
Perception
Transportation
Nothing transports like a song. Nothing evokes such memory. Like Proust's famous madeleines, the hearing of one song has transported me back twelve years and sixty-two miles away, to a world I no longer inhabit, to best friends and lovers I no longer know, to places I will probably never see again. At nineteen I bought…
The Thinker
"The less I think, the more I love." -My friend I have come to trust, despite dubious moments, that there is no solution in rough and tough self-talk and obsessive thinking. You know. The thinking that warns and threatens. That runs the black and white tapes of rigidity and scarcity. The bad girl tales. Those are beyond…
Above All, Compassion
There's this old Peter Gabriel song that really cracks me open, not only for its beauty and power but because it reminds me of a time in my life that was particularly dark and stormy. I remember listening to it on repeat in my old Honda Accord, driving home on Sunset still drunk on whiskey and coming…
This is the Part of Me
I had a therapist for a couple of years who practiced with me something called "Parts Work." It is deeply rooted in Jungian psychology, and at its essence draws upon the fact that we have many different parts inside of us and all deserve an equal voice. What tends to happen in fragmented psyches is…
The Deepest Sobriety
There are these moments that come every so often where I fall on my knees in a sort of tender, tearful reverence to the fact that I am sober and free from the hell of alcoholism. Sometimes it comes from reading a novel that recaptures haunting tales of destructive boozing and the interminable suffering that…
In Google We Trust
Just Google it. We all do it. And boy does it deliver. But I can get out of hand with it. You know, search for the meaning of life and the holy grail and the proof that I am worthy with a few clicks of the keyboard. It's possible that due to growing up in…
The Madness of Being Good
I'm having anxiety today. Some guilt. Waves of old feelings. And what whey all boil down to is this sense that I'm not doing it right. Whatever it is. Life? My day? My choices for the the next few months? It can get crazy in these heads of ours. Sometimes the more I meditate, the…
Perception: Body
Perhaps perception plays its most deceitful and nasty and fascinating and sometimes wonderful tricks when it comes to how we view our bodies and the bodies of others. Especially when you are a woman coming of age in the western world anytime in the past two centuries. The overriding perception is often this: there is something…
The Wonder of Perception
Perception is an interesting thing. In general, it is defined as our way of seeing or understanding something. It can also be defined as our way of interpreting something. Even further, it can be narrowed down to a specific sort of intuition or insight. In recovery we talk about perception very much being a choice…
A Full Life 