I’ve been most fortunate to have many wonderful teachers. I don’t believe I can put one above all the rest, since the strength of each teaching (and thus the influence of its teacher) really depended upon my own capacity to be teachable in that moment. This remains true for me to this day. What does […]
I write about recovery from addiction without religion, but spirituality has always been something that has given me great meaning in life. And the meaning of spirituality has changed for me over time. I was raised without any religious belief and was encouraged by loving parents to ‘find my own path’. I visited a couple […]
I wasn’t raised in any sort of religion. My parents never went to church. My father was raised in an Anglican tradition, but didn’t practice faith at all in adulthood. His only statement on religion was this, “They all say the same thing—live by the golden rule.” My mother was raised in a fire and […]
I was just diagnosed with ADHD. I always suspected I fell into that flavour of neurodivergence, so it’s helpful to get the empirical confirmation. I have a strong bias toward the AD part, although in my early years I scored top marks in both attention deficit and hyperactivity. Over course of my life, the most […]
The source of my social anxiety fatigue as an introvert is probably not uncommon: I’m an emotional intuitive (an empath). I don’t always act upon my empathy—that requires consciously and intentionally processing what I pick-up and interacting in return with loving kindness. I act on it more now than I did before I entered recovery. […]
Removing the word ‘mistake’ from one’s vocabulary turns every struggle into an adventure. These are all products of mistake-thinking: ‘doing it wrong’, ‘failing’, ‘looking like a fool’. The end result of all this nonsense is giving up. Without the concept of ‘mistake’ to distract you and discourage you, every process in life becomes an adventure! […]
My disease wants me identify with thought, write with proper diction, connect thoughts with logic, compare and contrast, bring hierarchy into order. My soul wants me to live from the heart. At one point about ten years ago, my heart was battered and bruised and short of breath. I shut it down. Locked it up […]
When the Twelve Steps were created in the 1930s, the founders didn’t know as much about the disease of alcoholism as we do today. But they understood how alcoholism feels and how it destroys lives. They also found a way to help people recover that has worked for almost 90 years. Back then, alcoholics experienced […]
I’ve always felt this nostalgia as an aching, a loneliness, and as a desire to flee to a place that doesn’t exist. It is a place of my dreams, a community of love and light and joy and peace, living off the land, self-sufficient, and all sacred paths converge there and there are even agnostics […]
The Peace of Wild Things 
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