emailexo

It was a potato farmer who first taught me about empathy, and how it is connected to this idea of Attunement. As a young student, I was impoverished and often hitchhiked – sometimes for long distances. Long distance hitchhiking is not quite the same thing as getting a lift to the next town; there is […]

Interstate Highway 89 crosses New Hampshire and leads to ski country in Vermont. During the winter it’s very crowded, but not nearly so much as the rare rest stops that seem to be mandatory for families and their children in frantic search for food, a place to pee or both. Hordes of parents and an

Fifty years ago, in a small clearing deep in the Peruvian Amazon, I met a man who would change my life as a doctor forever. He didn’t speak English or even Spanish. He was an Aquarauna hechiccero-curandero (witch/healer/shaman) to whom I had been brought by a young man I had met in a small town in the

Joan is an attractive, educated teacher of third graders. Happy and content, she loves her husband, enjoys her work, and has great plans for herself. However, Joan suffered terribly from a delusion so common that we all can learn from her pain. Joan suffered from the belief that she was her thoughts and that her

It was Halloween, and all the weather forecasts said to expect rain. Parents everywhere were scrambling to find raincoats or other means by which to keep their children dry on their special night. I ran into Rosie while waiting in a busy video store line. She spontaneously blurted out how frazzled and overwhelmed she was.

Donna had been married for four years and now that she had a real home and a 3-year-old daughter, in an unspoken yet predictable rite of passage, this set of circumstances conveyed upon her sufficient gravitas to host the yearly family dinner at Easter time. But it wasn’t until she was actually in the kitchen

It is when you are confused by the different (and sometimes conflicting) messages you get from your heart and mind that it is most difficult to observe the difference between your thoughts and feelings. In learning to clearly recognize what your heart and mind are saying, you must also be able to differentiate them from

There is a particular type of grin an infant gives that adults literally cannot resist. The grin is contagious – before long, the adult is smiling back and then making funny faces at the child, who smiles even more broadly and gurgles out that particular set of sounds we all recognize as the laughter of

“Walking in light” is a metaphor for a state of being that is probably most accurately described as being in a state of grace. Walking in light is different for different people in different circumstances. For the ancients, a state of grace was being in accord with The Way, Buddha, nature, Atman, What Is. In

Many think that guilt can be fixed with punishment. The problem, though, is when you try doling out punishment to yourself – using your own mind. If this self-inflicted punishment were a one-time thing – if you simply noted your mistake and moved on, having once been guilty but now truly wiser – a little