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Spiritual Growth

Selfish, unselfish, ‘love yourself’, love your neighbour

We’ve all heard it before: you can only love other people, if you love yourself. People saying that are generally speaking not the kind I personally take very seriously. However, as one reader told me in response to my last post (on my Dutch blog), I sounded just like them for a bit. I guess [...]

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Teaching people a lesson, in real life…

That’s me. Or used to be. I hope. I’m not talking about what the saying ‘teaching them a lesson’ has come to mean in every day speak. I don’t mean deliberately sabotaging things, or setting people up to fail or anything like that. Over the past 6 months or so I’ve been facing up to [...]

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Evil is treating people like things, Granny Weatherfax, #discworld Carpe Jugulum

For those of you who haven’t been reading my tweets: Three weeks ago now I developed a serious case of sciatica that kept me (mostly) in bed because of the pain for a day or two. Luckily, it seems the cause is NOT a herniated disc and I now consider myself fully recovered. I will [...]

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Is there something wrong with boredom, during meditation?

Merely putting the question answers it, I think: No, there is nothing wrong with boredom during meditation, at least, that’s how I feel. My recent blogposts about meditation have evoked many responses about my attitude towards that boredom I wrote about. And then, especially on my Dutch blog, my analysis of the responses was apparently [...]

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The unsaid basics of meditation and life

What we all do when we start something, when we do something, when we try something, when we read something, when we respond to something… is bring ourselves into it. I was a bit baffled by some of the responses to my post about the unsaid things about meditation. And what it was is this: [...]

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What they don’t tell you about meditation

The below was written over the past month, as I did a (mostly) daily regimen of 15 minutes of meditation based on the various books about Buddhist meditation I’ve been reading. 1) at first it’s like a sitting still exercise: avoiding the irrepressible urge to jump up and DO whatever it is you just thought [...]

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Change isn’t easy – Discover your dharma?

It’s not often that I write about books I don’t like. In fact I was going to ignore ‘Discover Your Dharma‘, but my mom persuaded me review it. She said, it makes a good story: a book that has won awards that you don’t like. Actually hate is a better word for my sentiments. I [...]

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Alzheimers and spiritual growth

A reader asked (in Dutch): As a social worker in a nursing home I had a conversation last week with the wife of a gentleman living on our psych-ward. This lady appeared not to need the most common forms of support in dealing with the loss of her husband through dementia. She didn’t need information [...]

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Saying Thank You and spirituality

There are widely different views on saying thank you, and how it relates to spirituality. In classic theosophical circles, at least here in The Netherlands, saying thank you is a bit of a taboo I’ve been fighting. It is thought that people who need a ‘thank you’ for their efforts are really not as devoted [...]

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Detox Cleanse: a week long experience

I was visiting one of our theosophical lodge members in hospital yesterday – despite setbacks and mediocre (if not bad) treatment by the staff she was quite upbeat. She had angel cards there, and stimulated me to draw one. I drew the one about cleansing and detoxification. It said that it would be good for [...]

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