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, […]
Category Archives: Blog
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 […]
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 […]
Emotion-Focused Mindfulness Therapy’s Secular Buddhist Roots
The Secular Buddhist Network, a new global hub for secular Buddhism in all its various manifestations, invited me to write a piece on EFMT’s secular Buddhist roots, particularly its relationship with Stephen Batchelor’s reinterpretation of the Four Noble Truths as four interrelated tasks we can weave into our practice and daily lives.
Therapists Need Therapy Too
Marian Platta writes in her (2018) article “Therapists Need Therapy Too” in Vice: “Acknowledging and accepting what haunts me has helped me become more empathetic towards my patients’ emotional suffering.” Many of us including myself were not aware the extent to which we were drawn to be a psychotherapist because of our own inner pain […]
Touching the Earth
I love this description from Susan Murphy, an Australian Zen teacher, of how she integrates Australian Aboriginal ways into her Buddhist practice, in “Indigenous Dharma: Native American and Buddhist Voices,” an article she co-authored in Inquiring Mind: “When you know the place where you are, practice begins,” says Dogen. One could say that every stage […]
There are Many Different Forms of Buddhism and Psychotherapy
This (Spring 2018) article, which Tricycle magazine is resharing through its multimedia platforms, by C.W. Huntington, Jr., a translator of Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhism, raises interesting questions, but is hampered by the way the author treats Buddhism and psychotherapy as singular entities, making sweeping over-generalizations about both. The categories of Theravada, Mahayana and Vajrayana Buddhism […]