I introduced our fledgling Touching the Earth (TtE) approach to readers on the Secular Buddhist Network (SBN) website about six months ago, after our first TtE daylong in November. SBN is a hub for all the various kinds of secular Buddhism worldwide. TtE has deep roots in secular Buddhism.

In this new article for SBN, Update on Touching the Earth, I describe how our TtE group has grown slowly and steadily from nine to twenty one members, successfully transitioned with COVID to an online format, and the enthusiasm with which participants are responding to it. Touching the Earth is a non-teacher-centric, self-help application of Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy, a community for cultivating mindfulness mindfulness as an embodied social practice.

I am grateful to Matt Barnes for interviewing me on the Social Work Me Podcast in a wide-ranging discussion on the development of Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy, including its Emotion-Focused Therapy orientation and aspects of its Mindfulness-Based and Buddhist roots. As we talked, the time flew by, and we realized we could have kept talking for hours.

The team that helps me plan and host our annual Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy Summer Retreat at the beautiful Ecology Retreat Centre north of Toronto (sadly cancelled this year because of the pandemic) has an inside joke about how the process of getting together to meditate, share, and organize and facilitate these retreats is our Rat Park. This is a reference to ground-breaking research conducted by Canadian psychologist Dr. Bruce Alexander. A new documentary on this research and its implications, Rat Park, was released last year.

Continue reading “What’s Your Rat Park?”

Carl Jung recommended, if at all possible, to return to the religion of one’s childhood. For many of us, this is a bit of a stretch, but what was more sacred than sitting on Mom or Dad’s lap sharing Dr. Seuss with us? Here it is brought alive by Wes Tank rapping Fox in Sox…

Mindfulness in the Garden: Zen Tools for Digging in the Dirt

Spring at last! I live in a condo and do not have a garden to stroll in right outside my door, but looking out my windows this morning, I can see Allan Gardens just south of us here in downtown Toronto, its trees beginning to bud. I walked through this park just the other day, socially distancing with an old friend. Entering that park was a balm.

Think of all the gardens, parks and wilderness, you and I, dear reader, have walked in with friends and family, how these experiences change us! 

This morning, I am reminded of words from Rumi, “we come from the garden to the garden.” I used to assume this referred to Rumi’s beliefs about where we came from before we were born and where we go when we die, but also something to do with where consciousness emerges from and returns to, in the moment. This morning I associate these words with integrating the easy aliveness to the world we knew once upon a time when we were young into our adult life, how that changes everything, brings us alive to how experiencing emerges out of our deep participation in the world and returns to it. Coming alive to the felt sense of how the world embraces us and co-constructs us, a thousand kisses deep.

A wonderful video interview of Viktor Frankl describing how surviving difficult situations depends on our ability to recognize our freedom to find meaning even in the midst of despair. He says that Despair = Suffering – Meaning.

Emotion-Focused Therapy agrees with this: we are at heart meaning-making creatures and adds that it is by learning how to navigate, make sense of and reflect on emotions that tells us what is most important to us and motivates us to act.

The SecularBuddhistNetwork.org just published an article I wrote on Touching the Earth:

A group of friends, colleagues and I are exploring a new, less hierarchical way for supporting each other in cultivating more genuine relationships with experience, other people and the world through mindfulness meditation and interpersonal sharing and exploration of meditation experience. Touching the Earth is a volunteer, self-help approach based on egalitarian, inclusive, and democratic values, one that seeks to avoid the ‘power-over’ issues that plague so many traditional teacher-centric Buddhist, Yogic and other spiritual groups worldwide, such as sexual abuse and boundary violations by meditation teachers...

Touching the earth: exploring a new, secular self-help mindfulness group approach

A new study suggests nightmares have more of a purpose than just scaring you.

I have a theory about nightmares. There is a little old lady in charge of nightmares. She has seen everything; she is trying to get good news to you; she has a wicked sense of humour; and she doesn’t mind scaring the shit out of you. 

My sense is nightmares can represent everyday modes that cause us suffering and are ripe for transformation. A nightmare picks us up and shakes us and says, it’s as if you were living your life like you are being chased by a scary monster or had just murdered someone and the police are about to arrest you, and, the goods new is, you don’t have to live this way. I have found reflecting on and deepening our experiencing of nightmares can be life-transforming. But, of course, deepening experiencing is itself life-transforming.