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Mike
Berkeley, California
High School teacher, meditation teacher, energy healer, NY Mets fan
Interests: Meditation, Spirituality, World Religions, Poetry, Music
Recent Activity
Healing Groups
Chapter 3 Section 10 It’s a profound truth of human life that we all need each other. We are designed for connection and thrive most in connection. Beyond this, we all have blind spots, things that we can’t really see clearly about our own experience because we’re in the middle... Continue reading
Posted Aug 3, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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The Work
Chapter 3 Section 9 Transformational Healing depends on a consistent daily practice of the Work. The Work involves all the sections in this chapter. Doing the Work involves trusting in the promise of the healing path, learning to silence the head, cultivate inner silence, and occupy the body; developing courage;... Continue reading
Posted Aug 3, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Freedom
Chapter 3 Section 8 My sense is that if we asked most Americans what does freedom mean, they would respond something like, “It means I can do whatever I want.” In fact, there are a few problems with that conventional definition of freedom. First of all, that definition conflates the... Continue reading
Posted Aug 3, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Self-Responsibility
Chapter 3 Section 7 Part of the process of maturation from childhood to adulthood is growing into more and more responsibility. As general rule, the individuals with greater responsibility tend to garner our respect. All the truly great human beings, sages and teachers, have been folks of exceptionally broad and... Continue reading
Posted Aug 3, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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The Quality of Attention
Chapter 3 Section 6 Attention is the very currency of the human psyche. The modern world is an attention-starved world, and everywhere people lament a paucity of attention. Multi-billion-dollar industries commodify human attention and consume for it for their own financial purposes. People feel they have so little attention to... Continue reading
Posted Aug 3, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Rigorous Honesty
Chapter 3 Section 5 The path of healing requires us to be rigorously honest with ourselves. I think many good people value honesty, consider themselves honest, and expect honesty from others. Many people are honest most of the time, except perhaps for a few white lies to save face. All... Continue reading
Posted Aug 3, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Capacity
Chapter 3 Section 4 A wise person once said to me, “The most important question in life is: what the size of your capacity?” How big is your capacity? In other words, how much emotional energy or emotional intensity can you hold, without losing your connection to yourself, losing your... Continue reading
Posted Aug 3, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Courage
Chapter 3 Section 3 The potential reward from walking the path of transformational healing is profound. At the outset, though, walking that path seems impossibly difficult. Walking that path requires a special kind of courage. I once read an account of a young man, a convict, who after years of... Continue reading
Posted Aug 1, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Stop Thinking
Chapter 3 Section 2 We live in a time and culture that wildly overvalues thinking. Now, head-level thinking is a useful tool for certain kinds of problem-solving as well as for creating at times a more balanced and levelheaded perspective. I in no way wish to deny the benefits of... Continue reading
Posted Aug 1, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Trust in the Possibility of Healing
Chapter 3 Section 1 In this chapter, I will talk about mindsets that are necessary to approach the path of healing. As we will see, many of the habitual ways of being encouraged by contemporary culture mitigate against or completely impede the process of healing. This situation is precise why... Continue reading
Posted Aug 1, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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People in Pain 6: Victim Stories
Authentic power comes deep within: it comes from the combination of intentional & focused attention and living in deep alignment with one’s self. All of us are far more powerful than we could even begin to imagine—such is simply the human condition. The world confuses power for control. We think... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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People in Pain 5: Attention
This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists and is built entirely out of attentiveness. — Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019) Self-aware volitional attention is what makes us human. Our capacity for attention is the most precious part of us, the prerequisite... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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People in Pain 4: Moral Disgust
People in pain need healing. Disgust is a natural human emotion. We all tend to feel some physical sort of revulsion toward thing that might make us sick, either oral contaminants (e.g., moldy or rotten foods) or disease vectors (e.g., blood or feces). It’s a natural emotion designed to keep... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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People in Pain 3: Fear
People in pain need healing. Fear is an ordinary natural emotion, simply part of what it is to be human. In healthy human experience, one may feel a twinge of fear, say, when facing a new and unfamiliar situation—one feels and acknowledges the fear, and then is able to assess... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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People in Pain 2: Toxic Shame
People in pain need healing. Toxic shame is the most miserably painful of all inner wounds. Toxic shame is the feeling that I am the lowest creature in existence, that my existence is a mistake, that my deepest nature is essentially repulsive and needs to be hidden from the world—if... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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People in Pain 1: Introduction
In the upcoming articles, I will be discussing the way that inner emotional pain manifests in attitudes and behaviors. This section will be a kind of catalogue of dysfunctions. Before I begin, it’s important to appreciate the purpose of such a section. We are biologically programmed to want to avoid... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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Table of Contents, Transformative Healing
The following articles may become a book at some point Chapter 1: Self Love and Emotional Health Self-Love 1: Why Self-Love? Self-Love 2: What Self-Love is Not Self-Love 3: Self-Love and Discernment Self-Love 4: Self-Love and Self-Discipline Emotional Health 1 Emotional Health 2 Emotional Health 3 Chapter 2: People in... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2022 at Mystic Rants
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The Four Levels of Gratitude
Gratitude is an emotional perspective that can transform the way we look at life. The Wisdom Traditions and modern neurobiological research agree: cultivating gratitude is a powerful way to make us considerably happier. If working with gratitude is relatively new to you, I highly recommend starting an intentional practice, say,... Continue reading
Posted Nov 25, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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Self-Love 4: Self-Love and Self-Discipline
Dr. Kristin Neff researches self-love. In her blog, she writes, “The number one reason people give for why they aren’t more self-compassionate is that they’re afraid if they’re too soft on themselves, they’ll let themselves get away with anything. They really believe that their internal judge plays a crucial role... Continue reading
Posted Jul 15, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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Self-Love 3: Self-Love and Discernment
Another confusion people have about self-love and self-acceptance involves conflating acceptance with indiscriminance, a kind of laissez-faire “anything goes.” Having punishingly harsh judgments about one’s self is crazy, and the opposite, a complete running wild, is also crazy. As a wise person once said, the opposite of crazy is also... Continue reading
Posted Jul 15, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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The Longest Shadow
One person stands out as the person who clearly has had the largest and deepest impact on the entire course of what we know as music, and that person is Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827). Many people fail to appreciate how music that bears no resemblance to his own still bears... Continue reading
Posted Jul 12, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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Self-Love 2: What Self-Love is Not
This is a the second in series of articles on self-love, self-compassion, and self-acceptance. Before continuing, we have to address a few obvious misconceptions. The terms “self-love” and “love of self” have gotten a bad rap in Western theology and religion. The criticisms tend to think of self-love either as... Continue reading
Posted Jul 12, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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Self-Love 1: Why Self Love?
This is a series of articles on self-love, self-compassion, and self-acceptance. Think of all the ethical ideals, how you should be treating others in order to be a good person. Why aren’t you giving yourself the same respect and care that you naturally give others? As I understand the wisdom... Continue reading
Posted Jul 12, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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Emotional Health, Part 3
Link to Emotional Health, Part 1 Link to Emotional Health, Part 2 This is the third and last part of my musings on emotional health. Once again, do not use these to beat yourself up or judge yourself or anyone else harshly. Start from a place of abundant self-love and... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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Emotional Health, Part 2
Link to Emotional Health, Part 1 This is part two of my musings on emotional health. Before reading this, ground yourself in self-love and self-acceptance. You are deeply lovable exactly as you are. If you embody some of the ideals here, commend yourself. If you see ideals that you don’t... Continue reading
Posted Jan 2, 2020 at Mystic Rants
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