Ancient Wisdom, New Story
These articles draw on the world’s wisdom traditions as well as modern psychology to recast personal stories, pointing new directions for personal growth and self-exploration.
Finding Yourself
Stop looking for the mother lode – Your True Self. Instead, pan for the golden nuggets in the complex stream of your varied and shifting identities.
Stories We Tell, Stories We Are
Much of the work I do with people is to help them look at their story in addition to the non-stop experience of looking through it. This wouldn’t be especially helpful unless we had the ability to change our stories. Luckily, we do, although they are stubborn.
Beyond Achievement
This doesn’t make us morally superior people. It means that our felt disparity between who we are and what we do pushes us onward. Our disillusionment with the cost-benefit analysis of our success spurs us to ask more questions, experiment beyond current comfort zones and seek a more expansive perspective. The bits of us that have been compressed or stifled demand attention.
Unfulfilled by Success? Try This…
Successful career? Yep. Track record of achievement? Yep. Impressive earnings? Yep. Living the life you truly want? Fulfilled? Um, not really. You’re not alone!
We Do Our Best
You may be richer, smarter, prettier or more charming tomorrow. But none of this means you have less worth today.
Dirty Enlightenment
Nothing needs to be different from how it is right now for us to be okay. There is no problem with the way things are in this or any moment. This understanding can yield a deep relaxation in which personal ups and downs unfold.
Life Purpose
Influences
These writers have helped me immensely. Maybe you would benefit from visiting them directly. In addition to those below, I recommend Alan Watts, Matt Kahn, Matt Licata and J. Krishnamurti.
Bruce Tift
Tift is a gifted therapist and practicing Buddhist. He helps us understand that we needn’t pathologise disturbing experience. We organise our lives around personal discomforts that seem unbearable, but we have capacities our child-selves didn’t, and we can now work with all experience.
Lisa Feldman Barrett
A former therapist, Feldman Barrett is now a neuroscientist challenging outdated views of the brain and mind. The brain’s predictions create our world, based on socially-inherited concepts. But we can update our conceptual library and re-cognise our reality.
Don Miguel Ruiz
Ruiz is a Toltec sage who gives an ancient ‘Western’ take on Eastern wisdom and spiritual growth. When we see our own dream (or story), fear loses its grip on us. When we love ourselves as we are, our relationships are no longer a search for what we already have.
David Deutsch
Deutsch is a physicist and computational scientist who places learning above knowledge. His ‘Many Worlds’ interpretation is our best explanation of quantum theory. I love his view of our ever-growing mastery barely scratching life’s mystery.
Mary O'Malley
O’Malley goes beyond Stoicism to show how what’s in the way is The Way. She shows how a few powerful assumptions, which she calls spells, shape the story through which reality arrives for us, and she invites us to use our bodies to overcome those spells.
Alan Watts
Part philosopher, part entertainer, Watts is my favourite guide to the spiritual journey. He translated the East for us and integrated it with Western thought. I most appreciate his Taoist writings and his invitation to insecurity.