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A Scandinavian tradition on Christmas Eve is to illuminate the graves — and spirits — of departed loved ones with candles (left). We dedicate this series to those who have recently suffered the loss of a loved one — especially during the holiday season.
When others around you are in a partying mood, it’s the most [...]

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Taking Care of No. 1
Processing loss draws down an enormous chunk of your psyche’s bandwidth. The death of a loved one is exhausting. You keep asking yourself what’s wrong with your because you’re staggering around as if you’ve been hit by a truck.
Your energy anatomy is metabolizing the loss. Other forms of loss — betrayal, [...]

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Re-orienting Yourself
The loss of a loved one is a shock to your system. It’s useful to remind yourself that you’re in trauma. A being who took up a Grand Canyon worth of space in your psyche is gone. The vacuum their loss has left leaves you confused – and reeling. So do drugs, alcohol, addictions, [...]

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A Whirlpool of Emotions

After the death of a loved one, every funeral home in America will give you a psychological tip-sheet that cites the five stages of grief. It’s cribbed from the 1969 book, On Death and Dying, by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, a Swiss-born psychiatrist who almost died as an infant (she was a two-pound, triplet). [...]

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What to Say to Someone Who has just Lost a Loved One

Woody Allen’s aphorism that “80 percent of success is simply showing up” is the cardinal rule when helping out someone who has just had a parent or loved one die on them.
If you want to be an anchor for a friend or lover who [...]

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Loss, Trauma and Somatic Therapy
On the opening page of Love in the Time of Cholera, Nobel-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez set down one of literary fiction’s most arresting images of death: He writes that a character who commits suicide “had escaped the torments of memory.”
The flip-side is that when the person who dies is one [...]

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How to Take a Leap of Faith
After the immediate shock of death or a life-loss, expressing your emotions and sharing your story of the loss helps to discharge some of the trauma. But if you cling to the story of that loss for years, the narrative itself has become a self-reinforcing source of trauma. You’ve [...]

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Why People Can’t Get Over a Lost Love
“You had me at cathexis,” is a line of real-life dialogue from one of our own nine love-lives. It’s also a pun on the signature line in the movie, Jerry Maguire. If break-ups are the most common form of loss around us today, then the term cathexis is [...]

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Getting Over a Break-Up: The ‘Spotless Mind’ Method

Break-ups are the most common source of loss around us today. Suddenly cut off by a lover or a spouse, many people experience loss so intensely that the only relief they can imagine is imagining that their ex didn’t exist at all. There’s a quirky logic to it: [...]

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No Hay Mal Que Por Bien No Venga
Latina superstar Gloria Estefan knows a thing or two about pain and loss. In 1990, her tour bus was crushed by a truck — and smashed several of her vertebrea. Doctors fused them with titanium rods but told the salsa queen that she’d end up in a wheelchair.
“Because [...]

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A vanguard of self-schooled female mystics are doing an end-run around the mainstream self-help and New Age movements — and are advancing a radical, 21st century spirituality. Call it the ‘Anti-Me Generation.’
In this series, we introduce some of the avatars of the sage sex, and their teachings:
Across the centuries, spiritual seekers have invariably been [...]

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These wise-women represent an implicit indictment of the legion of vendors from the human potential movement who appear on Oprah’s show, or who fill the pages of Common Ground. Those services are New Age brands that explicitly pitch self-improvement, and promise to fill in the ego’s deficits.
But Byron Katie, Catherine Ingram and the Australian-born mystic, [...]

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This ‘Anti-Me’ generation of teachers also resists branding particular counter-measures for the likes of anxiety, addictions, adultery and affairs.
“I’m reluctant to specify a goal or repetitive motion using some technique,” says Ingram. “I see people identifying as the doer — ‘I sat for two hours without moving,’ ‘I’ve completed forty-five retreats,’ — proudly waving the banner of [...]

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A notable exception to the No Logo rule is Byron Katie, who calls her work, well, The Work. But she’s the best example of a self-schooled female mystic. For two years, Katie was so maniacally depressed she rarely got out of bed. A mother of two boys and a teenaged girl in Bakersfield, CA and an alcoholic, [...]

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While Byron Katie has tried to codify her Work, her approach is still very much a common touchstone for the teachings of the new, self-styled prophets. She uses thought to disarm itself through a sequence of deceptively simple questions. Other approaches tend to elude language.
Pamela Wilson (posing at left beside a picture of Ramani Maharshi, [...]

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One reason it is hard to codify some of the practices of post-modern mystics in words is because they’re more like signposts that point you toward a mental state that lies precisely beyond words. How-to tips are superceded by a stronger path of transmission at the disposal of Pamela Wilson, Byron Katie and the others: [...]

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How, exactly, did these remarkable women emerge as “realized” beings in our data-infused, image-obsessed society? Like Katie, most of them have reported a fundamental dissolution of a social or personal identity. For Smadar de Lange (left), a rising star who represents the next generation of female mystics, it came after a traumatic motorcycle accident.
For Ingram, her [...]

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We’re big fans of David Richo, a former Roman Catholic priest who integrated his Christian training into a Buddhist conversion — and found international acclaim as a spiritual teacher and author.
Most of all we’re impressed by the power of David’s personal presence, which is why it’s such a privilege to experience it in a face-to-face [...]

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A FAMILY AFFAIR

December is high-season for socializing. But office parties or holiday family get-togethers can spin off a yin-yang quality. Yes, they are peak moments for comfort and genuine joy. They’re also forums for Pulp Fiction-style medieval moments: heightened emotions, childhood memories and other id-stuff will magnify the dark side of people’s addictions.
How many times [...]

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