How to Build Trust and Feel Safe In Your Relationship: The Art of “Hold Me Tight” Conversations

Dr. Sue Johnson on how to have a “Hold Me Tight” conversation with your partner | Watch my full interview with iconic therapist Dr. Sue Johnson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyN-H…

Richard Rohr: Healing Addiction

Much of Jesus’ work was healing, with many of his teachings illustrating the healings. Nine of Jesus’ healing stories are actually exorcisms. While the term may be off-putting, the fact that there are so many exorcisms in the Gospels speaks to their importance. I believe “possession by devils” refers to what we now call addiction. The “possessed” person is in some sense trapped by a larger force and is powerless to do anything about it. The only cure for possession is “repossession” by Something Greater than the disease. This is why Bill Wilson said that a vital spiritual experience” is necessary for full recovery.

I’m convinced that when the great medieval spiritual teachers talked so much about attachment, they were really talking about addiction. We are all attached and addicted in some way. At the very least, we are addicted to our compulsive dualistic patterns of thinking, to our preferred self-image, and to the usually unworkable programs for happiness we developed in childhood—which then showed themselves to be inadequate or even wrong.

Richard Rohr: Hinduism: Action and Contemplation

Krishna has even been called “The Unknown Christ of Hinduism”—the same mystery of spirit and matter that we Western Christians, with our dualistic minds, struggled to put together in Jesus.

Krishna, like Jesus, also shows the integration of action and contemplation. The Gita does not counsel that we all become monks or solitaries. Rather, Lord Krishna tells Prince Arjuna that the true synthesis is found in a life-long purification of motive, intention, and focus in our world of action.

How can we do “pure action”? Only by gradually detaching from all the fruits of action and doing everything purely for the love of God, Lord Krishna teaches.

Jesus says the same thing in several places (Mark 12:30, for example): “You shall love the Lord with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.” Jesus even counsels the same love toward the neighbor (Matthew 22:39). The only way to integrate action and contemplation is to go ahead and do your action, but every day to ask yourself why you’re doing it. Is it to make money? Is it to have a good reputation? Is it to keep busy? Or is it for the love of God? Then you will discover the true Doer!

.. Reflect on these passages from the Bhagavad Gita (4:18, 23-24):

The wise see that there is action in the midst of inaction,
and inaction in the midst of action.
Their consciousness is unified,
and every act is done with complete awareness.

When a man has let go of attachments,
when his mind is rooted in wisdom,
everything he does is worship,
and his actions all melt away.

God is the offering. God
is the offered, poured out by God;
God is attained by all those
who see God in every action.

 

The Jordan Peterson Moment

My friend Tyler Cowen argues that Jordan Peterson is the most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now, and he has a point. Peterson, a University of Toronto psychologist, has found his real home on YouTube, where his videos have attracted something like 40 million views.

In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined — how to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives.

.. His worldview begins with the belief that life is essentially a series of ruthless dominance competitions. The strong get the spoils and the weak become meek, defeated, unknown and unloved.

For much of Western history, he argues, Christianity restrained the human tendency toward barbarism. But God died in the 19th century, and Christian dogma and discipline died with him. That gave us the age of ideology, the age of fascism and communism — and with it, Auschwitz, Dachau and the gulag.

.. Since most conflict is over values, we’ve decided to not have any values. We’ll celebrate relativism and tolerance.

.. Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters. … Most men do not meet female human standards.”

.. Life is suffering, Peterson reiterates. Don’t be fooled by the naïve optimism of progressive ideology. Life is about remorseless struggle and pain. Your instinct is to whine, to play the victim, to seek vengeance.

.. “The individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike.”

.. Instead, choose discipline, courage and self-sacrifice.

.. Much of Peterson’s advice sounds to me like vague exhortatory banality. Like Hobbes and Nietzsche before him, he seems to imagine an overly brutalistic universe, nearly without benevolence, beauty, attachment and love. His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.