Psychology and Spirituality: Growing Up and Waking Up
The invitation is to weave these two journeys together. Growing up helps bring tenderness to my own humanity, while waking up reminds me that my identity is larger than the struggles I face. Together, they invite a way of being that is both deeply human and gently transcendent.
Spiritual Bypassing & Spiritual Experience
When our spiritual practice is not integrated with our psychological material, it can lead to shadow problems. We split ourselves in an unhelpful way that is not true to any path of wholeness or spiritual transformation.
Soul, Spirituality & Psychology
Soul is the most common translation of the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psyche . The biblical meanings of these concepts are richly varied. In the Old Testament, for example, the meanings of nephesh range from life, the inner person (particularly thoughts, feelings and passions), to the whole person, including the body. Similarly, in the New Testament, psyche carries such meaning as the totality of the person, physical life, mind and heart. Here, soul is presente
Psychological Ways We Can Undermine Our Spiritual Transformation
In my earlier article on Struggling with Prayer: A Psychological Perspective , I looked at ways we can unconsciously resist the change prayer can start to bring within us. In this article, I take a wider view to look at ways we can undermine or sabotage our spiritual transformation. It may, at first, seem a strange idea that we can in some unconscious way resist our transformation in Christ, which is what we consciously desire and proclaim. But growth is understanding what w
Knowing God: Wholeness & Self-Knowledge
In our contemporary world, we understand that psychological growth and spiritual growth are intricately linked. A mature relationship with the divine demands, and is supported by, a striving for psychological wholeness. This has also long been understood by the great spiritual guides of the past. John Calvin in 1536 said: 'There is no deep knowing of God without a deep knowing of self, and no deep knowing of self without a deep knowing of God.' And his contemporary from a ve
Spiritual Life and Our Emotions Part 3 : Practical Prayer
Having looked at some of the benefits and challenges of our emotions in the spiritual life and journey, we can now explore some practical ancient ways of meditative prayer to facilitate this process. The key is to find, and rest in, a place of undefended awareness where we can open to the divine with intention of heart in the midst of our emotional turmoil; returning again and again to the unconditional divine embrace that offers us this freedom of heart. So, below, I explor
Spiritual Pathology
Spiritual pathology describes how we can distort and undermine our spiritual path and its practices, because of our own deep unresolved inner emotional wounds and issues. I have written in ' Spiritual Life and the Shadow ' how part of our unconscious self - the Shadow - can influence us in often unrecognised ways. We can take this a step further to understand how it can also influence the way we view and distort our chosen spiritual path and its practice; the delusions we ca
Living With Paradox
In our Western world many people suffer from an inability to live with paradox and contradiction. We have lost touch with paradoxical, mystical or contemplative thinking in an education system with its basis in formal laws of logic and linearity, which has an unfortunate tendency to reinforce either/ or dualistic thinking. The startling idea that truth can be multilayered, unpredictable and contradictory is generally not a part of our modern Western world. Yet many of our gre
Spiritual Life and Our Emotions Part 2 - Spiritual Bypassing
Spiritual bypassing, a term coined by psychologist John Welwood in 1983, is the use of spiritual beliefs and practices to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs. It is pervasive in our culture - both personally and collectively - where we don't have much tolerance or acquired skill to face our pain, preferring instead a numbing analgesic, particularly if it can be seemingly legitimized by 'higher' spiritual goals and values. The c
Spiritual Life and Our Emotions Part 1
Transformation of our emotion life remains one of the greatest challenges confronting us on our spiritual path. Indeed, perhaps in exasperation, many historical strands of Christianity relegated feelings to an inferior and suspect status, often seeing them as manifestations of female weakness far less trustworthy and more 'primitive' than 'male' rational powers. Strong feelings needed to be muted for fear of muddying objectivity, with 'dispassion' being seen as somehow super
