Have you ever felt inadequate for not having studied a certain teacher or approach? Often we are made to feel that the magic is out there, in a guru, a book, a degree, or an expensive program. That’s why I love the work of Alan Watts so much. I regard him as a self-styled self-stylist; An anti-guru who never had an organization you could join.

I’ve noticed that most of the people who end up on a therapy couch appear to overweight the experience of others. This theme keeps popping up in my sessions. How much do we balance the interests of others (belonging) with the interests of self (authenticity)? Whether nature or nurture, we all seem to have ended up at different weightings.

At some point in life, we’re likely to find ourselves in tactical hell, a place where our potential feels completely collapsed and nothing seems possible. It might feel like we’re cheese-grating our soul in a gray wasteland.

I hear a lot of despair these days. It can feel like the compound karma of our past actions is going to drive us off a collective cliff. It’s clear that you can’t find safety in the social world, particularly not as seen through the lens of media and social media. So where do you find safety?

In sessions, I’m often invited into a dark and dingy mental space where everything appears stuck and hopeless. “There’s just no way out of this”, I’m told as if THE truth has just been delivered. “I’ll never be done with my trauma!”

If you want to improve the quality of your relationships, learn to listen better. Nothing will have a greater effect. Listening is mindfulness in action. It is the most applied and useful form of meditation that exists.

We tend to think of ourselves as fairly rational and consistent over time but most of us are FAR from it. When we feel tired, stressed, ill, or threatened, we lose our sense of self, or system-wide perspective.

Once upon a time two frogs fell into a large pail of buttermilk. Frantically thrashing about in fear of dying, the frogs climbed on each other, splashed furiously, and did whatever they could to stay afloat. As they grew tired and weary and their fear of drowning grew, they thrashed about more desperately.

A tricky question often comes up when I work with clients. Is this about you needing to change or the situation needing to change? Don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot to be said for being like water, flowing around obstacles, adapting the self, and becoming ever more ingenious. Highly sensitive people and empaths are usually experts at this. And they are usualy rookies at setting boundaries and taking up space.

When you connect to your self deeply, you gain access to your robust biological reality, you become a force of nature. People who are in their heads and disconnected from themselves are flimsy. They crumple easily. They have no window of tolerance. They react and regret it later.

I asked ChatGPT to create a hilarious joke about therapists and this is what it came up with: Why don't therapists ever play hide and seek?Because good luck hiding when they can see right through you, even when you're in the closet!

Not bad ChatGpt.

It got me thinking about several clients that have asked me to (in client’s words), call them out on their bullshit.

Yes, that’s right. Special! From the latin specialis, or belonging to a particular species or kind. You are one-of-a-kind! The cutting edge of nature unfolding. The universe expressing itself to the best of its ability right now. You are literally made of stardust. Despite these facts, our guardians like to minimize how special we are. In keeping us safe, they dim our starlight. They trim us down to size. They tell us we are “too much,” that we have no right to “bigness”.

More than any other technology, the internet is an externalization of the collective imagination. It is a pulsating, electronic coral reef where our collective imagination is becoming more visible and more crystalized each day. It is the human production that most resembles nature.

You can think of imagination as another dimension of reality that we draw upon to shift our material reality. It gives us magical powers. It pulls in information from the wider system that is not available in regular egoic consciousness. You can never predict what we will imagine next. It jumps the box. It always defies expectations.

Today we get to a juicy part of the model, the Creative Genius. First off, there is a damaging myth in our society that some people are born with genius and don’t need to try very hard. Well, the book Talent is Overrated unravels this myth of innate genius and provides abundant data that raw talent is, well, overrated.

I call them the Guardians of Goodness for a reason. It may seem that our guardians protect us from a sea of despair, a volcano of anger, or a pit of writhing serpents. Dick Schwartz, founder of Internal Family Systems, refers to this as the “veneer theory of psychology,” which prevailed over much of the last century. The veneer theory goes that our ego rightly represses our deeper animal or primal nature, which would be unreasonably hedonistic and destructive if we let it loose. Well, if you cage and mistreat an animal for centuries it will have built up some steam!

So often our healing turns into a long and windy road where the destination is shrouded in fog and we keep finding ourselves on ground we’ve already covered. What’s happening here? Is this a hard fact of life or are we delaying matters or getting in our own way? Well, I’ve seen healing happen quickly and powerfully and stick. When we let it, the unconscious mind knows how to heal itself in the same way your body knows how to heal from a wound.

Today we meet the Escape Artist. This guardian comes to the rescue when reality is boring, confining, depressing, or just too much for us. Ultimately, the Escape Artist is running from inner deadness. By escaping, it brings us back to life for a moment.

The escape artist fixates on the next escape and obsesses over the details of the escape-world. Escapes can take the form of substances, sex, extreme sports, travel, video games, or anything obsessional or underground. They are physical or psychological escapes, or places where we venture out near the edge to flirt with novelty and danger.

Today we meet the emotional jellyfish. Unlike most of the guardians on our list, this thin-skinned creature feels deeply and is easily swept away by overpowering emotions and relational experiences. It has porous boundaries and soaks up the energies and emotions of others around it. It floats high like a butterfly in social and emotional currents and then stings like a bee when things finally get too much.

Today we meet the Perfectionist. This meticulous little master takes great pleasure in directing a narrow laser beam of focus on a micro-square inch of reality. The perfectionist doesn’t cope well with changes. It implicitly assumes that the world is stable enough to perfect something. It screens out most of reality, focusing on a small domain where an illusion of control and certainty can be maintained.