The 21 Day Compassion Challenge

The 21 Day Compassion Challenge

What does it take to become more tender, open-hearted, and compassionate human beings in a world that trains us to judge, criticize, compare, blame, and shame? How does this evolutionary initiation happen, when one makes the journey from the head to the heart and...

Two Ways to Open the Heart

Two Ways to Open the Heart

Mount Shasta at dawn. Take a moment and do a little exercise with me, if you feel inspired to do so. Consider someone you really loved and lost. Remember the feel of that person, the joy he or she evoked in you. Pull up a memory of how you felt when you were...

How to Deal with Your Inner Critic

How to Deal with Your Inner Critic

Yesterday, Martha Beck and I co-taught the first of eight classes in our Coming Home to Your Spirit class. We were very excited about teaching something that would give us a venue to discuss publicly the kinds of spiritual concepts we’ve been discussing privately...

An Invitation to Peace

An Invitation to Peace

I just returned from two weeks in Peru, where my friend Dennis and I trekked up to 16,000 feet in the Andes and stayed in a small village with the people of the Q’eros as part of my research for an upcoming book Sacred Medicine. What I gleaned from the trip was not...

How Loss Can Initiate You

How Loss Can Initiate You

I’ve experienced a lot of loss this year. Most of the loss has come as my own choice, which in some ways makes it even harder. I can’t even fall back on feelings of victimhood because I’ve brought all this loss upon myself, not because I’m a masochist, but because...