Dear friends,

I hope you are well in these confused and trying times. Something that has served me as an anchor for years (and even more so lately) has been my meditation practice. I thought I might share a new perspective on it that’s recently opened for me.

I try to do a bit of formal practice every day. Some sits feel like a waste, as my thinking has so much inertia that no amount of mindfulness seems to slow it down. (Still, I think this makes these sessions no less valuable, as it is one thing to be distracted and quite another to know just how distracted you are.) But sometimes, the mind does cool down, thought subsides, and the openness of non-dual awareness blossoms. It is after these sessions that something special occurs.

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Dear friends,

This Valentine’s Day taught me a simple but deeply meaningful lesson, one I’d like to share with you.

It was time for breakfast, and my partner and I were waiting for our boy, Alexy, at the kitchen table. He was taking more time than usual to get ready, and when he arrived, he came with two Valentine’s Day cards, one for me and one for Elly, my partner. The cards were in DIY envelopes on which Alexy had drawn heart-shaped portraits of Elly and me. Inside, he expressed his love and gratitude for our being there for him. (Alexy’s cards were all the more moving for his brazen disregard of Bulgarian grammar and punctuation; modernist prose at its finest!) Elly teared up, and the three of us embraced… But I was filled with a mixture of feelings that was altogether not too pleasant.

Alexy’s gift moved me deeply, moved me to tears in fact, but in spite of that—or rather, because of that—a gnawing sense of guilt arose within me. First, I thought, I had not gotten any present for him, and second, the beautiful necklace I had bought for Elly seemed like such an inadequate, impersonal gift next to what Alexy had made for us. So, there I made my first mistake; clinging to my perceived “performance” on the occasion, I made myself unable to receive Alexy’s gift, unable to allow myself the love he was giving me freely. I made my second mistake, too: I determined to “fix” the situation by buying more gifts.

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Dear friends,

Lately, I have been slowly finding my way back to the Christian tradition. Or it may be more accurate to say that I am finding my way to it anew, now that I have spent years focused on the contemplative traditions of the East and on the insights of depth psychology.

In any case, I have been reading John A. Sanford’s book, The Kingdom Within, where he applies Jungian concepts in his reading of the Gospels to reveal the hidden meanings of Jesus’ teachings. (You can read it for free here.) It is a wonderful book, and here I wanted to share with you one interesting observation the author makes on how Jesus uses language.

Sanford points out that Jesus’ parables release meaning in the same way that our dreams do. In Jungian terms, Jesus’ language is not semiotic, nor allegorical, but symbolic.

A semiotic expression would be to say, “I’m travelling to the Big Apple”. Here, I say one thing which both you and I know means some other specific thing. “Big Apple” means “New York City”.

An allegorical expression would be to say, “A relationship is like a tree, and good memories are like the fruit of the tree, so tend to the tree if you wish to reap the fruit.” Here, I am using images to illustrate some facts from life we are both familiar with. I am paraphrasing reality in the language of images. We may easily assume this is what Jesus is doing in his teachings, but we would then miss out on the true depth he is offering.

Jesus speaks symbolically, which Carl Jung defines so:

[T]he best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic…

C.G. Jung, Psychological Types

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Dear friends,

The end of the year approaches, and with it approaches renewal. The past 12 months have been a difficult and humbling experience for me, and yet I cannot help but look back on them with gratitude. This reminds me of an experience I had a few months ago…

I was standing in an empty c…

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Dear friends,

Thank you for helping me do this work and give it the time and space it requires. I have been pondering ways of showing my appreciation for your support that will be both meaningful to you and sustainable for me… Today I am launching a new series of monthly letters I’ll be writing just for you. I hope this will be a way to connect on a more personal level, and also a way for me to share thoughts that don’t make it into my public work.

I had a striking experience recently I thought I might share in this first letter. It happened in the midst of inner misery, after a bad argument with Elly, my partner, that left both of us hurt and distant. I felt broken, abandoned, misunderstood… Life was cruel, and somehow I was both the victim and to blame for it all. Making my usual escape from feelings into work, I was trying to do reading for my upcoming podcast with Dr Pim van Lommel. A verse from the Katha Upanishad he had included in his book caught my eye:

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