Art by Mira KleinI’m preparing to teach a class called Becoming Unfuckwithable: Finding Your Sacred “No” So Your Yes Is A “Hell Yeah,” and as part of creating curriculum for that class, I’ve been pondering what makes people “fuckwithable” in the first place. Part...
Last month’s Conspirituality podcast shared stories of “spiritual heartbreak.” Listening to those stories left me in tears, not just tears of empathy for the spiritually heartbroken who were exploited when they dared to trust, but for my own parts that have been...
In response to a post about why we would be wise to be wary of spiritual showoffs, a reader, Matthew commented: “I've been asked recently what I do to look after my spiritual needs. My knee-jerk reaction was to flounder around and justify some of my alone time as a...
When I first got involved with Internal Family Systems (IFS) a decade ago, I did not expect it to wind up being a spiritual path. I started practicing IFS for the reason most people do- as a way to deal with untreated trauma and as an antidote to the spiritual...
Some of the least empathic people I've ever met are the ones who identify as "empaths." But I do not blame these people for their insensitivity that can border on cruelty. I truly believe they know not what they do- because they cannot handle feeling all the feels...
I was lucky to grow up with a nervous system that likes close, bonded, intimate relationships. Getting close to people isn't hard for me. I have a low tolerance for relationships that lack the capacity for intimacy and am absolutely awful at small talk. If I'm...
Nobody could easily see how badly the little boy in the middle pew in the fundamentalist Christian church had been beaten because his father always made sure it was the boy’s hind-quarters that bore the bruises, cuts, and oozing welts, safely hidden beneath...
I was raised to be a good little Christian girl. Independent thinking or rebellion of any kind were suppressed from as early on as I could remember. The rules were clear, and disobedience was punishable not only by a lifetime of blistered flesh in the torture of...