Every child needs perfect parents.  If parents are not perfect, meaning these parents carry unresolved trauma from their own childhood, they will hurt their child.  Any wound that is unresolved will leak through.  This is child abuse.

Sadly, no one had perfect parents.  We are all abused children which explains so much, if not all, of the world’s insanity.  Collectively, humans are a traumatized species, often hard to see since this is the norm. Continue reading →

Vertical Growth—Horizontal Distraction

True growth is vertical.  A rare few soar to new heights of self-awareness, as they dig deep into themselves to heal repressed trauma and liberate buried magnificence.  This profound dialogue between depth and height is the way new consciousness grows.  These rare few use love and work to evolve life to the next level of awareness and meaning.

Most people, the unconscious masses, mistakenly call horizontal development—growth.  Love and work serve selfish, violent ends that are unsustainable and destructive of life.  This is the norm. Continue reading →

It is not just victims of war, sexual abuse and other brutality who carry trauma—we all do.   We are all traumatized due to childhood misfortune and collective ancestral insanity.

Through my observations of my own inner world, of the people I work with as a therapist and my observations of the troubled global community, I realize that our species carries a tragic legacy of trauma. From the mists of time, when our human species first emerged, until now, we have misused our capacity of consciousness to become clever, brutal, overpopulating animals and not self-aware stewards of life.  This misuse of mind has wounded us, traumatized us.

We have blamed our destructive ways on our flawed human nature, the evil Other, or even on original sin.  But this is not true.  Trauma is the culprit that distorts our perception of reality.  Our essential human nature is good.  As we grieve and heal our traumatic past, we begin to know that our essence is true and our greatest hope.

When we heal our traumatic history, our true self begins to interface with truth.  With truth as our guide, we can do the real work of life which is to evolve consciousness to the next level of understanding.  When we experience this true purpose, we experience an abiding faith in the goodness of life and our role in it.  No matter the cruelty and confusion of the world around us, our life takes on a new meaning that inspires hope in ourselves and others for a new future.

I often ask others, “What is your passion?  What makes you tick?  What are you living for in the deepest sense?  What inspires you to go forward?”  Secretly, I’m hoping to discover my own passion, purpose and reason for being.

So I mused on this quietly for a while and this is what came to me.

My passion, my deepest purpose, my reason for being is to grow, to evolve, to become more conscious.  Ultimately I want to become at one with life and its mystery.

But at times, this passionate purpose can seem hard to define and hard to measure.

In the past, my passion and purpose were more quantifiable.  I wanted a love partner and success in my career.  I wanted to work and support myself in a meaningful and abundant way.  I wanted my parents to see me and love me at last.  Some of these goals I accomplished.  Some were impossible.  But win or lose, these were tangible goals.  But now I realize that they were secondary to my primary goal.

Now I see that underneath and running through all life goals, with their victories and defeats, was a deeper quest.  My passion was to tap into the river of meaning that flows through all of reality and through each age-appropriate quest in life.

The quest to become consonant with life’s meaning is my primary passion and always was, even with other secondary, more concrete goals.

Now I see what my passion is:  to answer the questions of life and solve the mystery of existence through my living and doing.  My passion is to become fully conscious and consonant with truth.  Other goals, though necessary in our lives, are secondary to this primary purpose.  Now this perspective guides my daily living, loving and doing.

I’m grateful to have solved this riddle of existence which represents a mutation in self-understanding.  As I strive to become consonant with truth, my daily living becomes sacred.

We belong to ourselves.  We must remember if we are to be real and true, we belong to ourselves, to nature and to truth—not the limits of our upbringing.

Despite the common thinking of the world that argues we belong to our parents, our families, our culture and its values and traditions, this is not true.  We do not belong to limited people or systems that would confine our growth and damage our spirit.  We belong to ourselves and to universal principle and must leave the limits of our upbringing to live true.

But there is a struggle.

There is great pressure from our families and the conventional world to stay behind and honor mother and father and their world no matter how limited, dysfunctional or cruel and it takes an unusually gifted soul to leave it.  We were born into this world and our departure has a heartbreaking aspect to it since it is hard to see the failures of our first loves, mother and father and face the limits of our culture of origin.

Those who did not have the courage to leave will always resent those who do.  In fact those who stay behind will work hard to shame, guilt, withhold love and even shun those who escape the snares of a closed, cultist family system.  This is a sad and cruel manipulation.  Those who stay behind see those who leave as a threatening reminder of what they failed to do—become themselves, true people.  The free spirit of those who left reveals the closed prison of those who took the easier path of conformity and stayed behind.

But the troubling manipulations of the family to return to their world do not work.  Those who have tasted freedom and belong to life and its mystery do not return to the prison of safety and convention.  Rather these free spirits soar to higher realms of consciousness and wonder, unknown to the average.