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, …
Category Archives: Blog
Social Work Me Podcast Interview
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 …
What’s Your Rat Park?
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 …
Childhood Magic
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…
From the Garden to the Garden
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, …
Despair = Suffering – Meaning
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 …
Brief Guided Calming Meditation
A friend asked if I had any recordings of my guided meditation, and I didn’t, but it inspired me to Google how to make a video and post it, and here it is on first take: a brief guided meditation for grounding and calming. This is the meditation I provide when clients are feeling emotionally …
Pandemic
What if you thought of itas the Jews consider the Sabbath—the most sacred of times?Cease from travel.Cease from buying and selling.Give up, just for now,on trying to make the worlddifferent than it is.Sing. Pray. Touch only thoseto whom you commit your life.Center down.
Touching the earth: exploring a new, secular self-help mindfulness group approach
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 …
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Learning from Nightmares
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 …