It’s been a year now that I’ve been writing on Substack, and since I disappointed a few people by doing this instead of writing a book, I thought I’d prepare a summary guide to all the key essays on a “Compassionate Consent to Reality.” I thought I’d share that guide here too:
A Summary Guide to A Compassionate Consent to Reality
Introductory Pieces
A Compassionate Consent to Reality (The project and my approach, which I’ve mostly followed)
Introducing a Compassionate Consent to Reality (Introduction to the central concepts)
Telling it Plain (A simpler summary)
Compassion
Adding Compassion (Finding the reality of compassion all around us even if there are sometimes reasons to doubt.)
Radical Self-Acceptance (Compassion for self and others begins with acknowledging that we are all “fundamentally mixed” – good and evil, strong and weak – and yet we are all loved and inter-connected.)
Why Do We Hunger for Beauty? (Why does beauty make me feel loved? And what is that mysterious meaning and yearning that beauty creates?)
Consent
Consenting to Life Itself (Little moments of consent make a life of ultimate consent possible. Are we braced against life or are we yielding/welcoming?)
Just Let It Be for Love (We long to consent, to trust and ask for help, yet we often don’t yield regularly until we practice a discipline that reminds us.)
Frustration, My Friend (Tolerating frustration by accepting our powerlessness, especially giving up trying to control other people. Control as the opposite of consent.) – ALSO tolerating emotions
Facing Reality (Avoiding Avoidance)
Blowin’ in the Wind (Facing reality requires accepting the pain of suffering, including the suffering of others.)
Sampling My Reality (A personal look at what a day of trying to face present and recalled bits of reality looks like.)
A Long, Loving Look at the Real (A phrase from William McNamara [1974] that connects reality, contemplation and spiritual connection.)
Why It’s Better to Look Death in the Face (When death awareness threatens us from the edges, we get anxious and defensive, but when we turn to face death together we gain perspective on the value of life and become more compassionate.)
Rumination: Avoidance on Repeat (Repetitive thinking, “playing tapes,” is harmful to our mental health and is likely a form of avoidance. It’s worth getting serious about stopping.)
I’m Useless at Weeping (The challenge of staying emotionally present to reality.)
The Deception of Old Maps (Why we need right-brained approaches to see and know reality – and how the left gets in the way. Note that this is Pt. 2 to that comes below.)
The Intuition Dilemma (Intuition is our best means to seeing reality, but it remains very fallible; in other words: viewed optimistically, intuition is a superpower; pessimistically, it can seem a dangerous risk. We can lessen the risks of this necessary dilemma.)
Confronting Our Evil (1, 2, and 3) (Three part series on how part of the reality that we need to face is confronting the “evil” that remains in us.)
Healing
Knowing What We Know (Dr. Bessel van der Kolk described the essence of healing as “knowing what we know and feeling what we feel.” There are earlier roots to that phrase that help us understand why this is healing.)
Facing a Nightmare (I use the example of being healed of a recurring nightmare to introduce and provide a “dim echo” of the essence of healing from trauma.)
Dancing with our Stuckness (I introduce a metaphor to help imagine what the process of healing can be like.)
Getting Unstuck (A more substantive post describing a possible form, four movements, for the dance of healing.)
When Trauma Doesn’t End (How does one find healing when the trauma is ongoing? How do we live honestly in the tension of accepting a painful powerlessness and still find the ability to do what is possible?)
Hopeless Cases (With the help of Betty Edwards’ Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain, I make the case that healing also involves blocking our left hemisphere from interfering with our right hemisphere’s ability to see anew and get unstuck, i.e. healed.)
Maturing
A Mosaic of Spiritual Development (An introduction to an alternative “non-stage” model of maturing or spiritual development.)
Avoiding Maturity 1.0 – Rigidity (Some of the forces behind our blocking maturity by closing ourself off to life’s complexity.)
Avoiding Maturity 2.0 – Fragmentation (Using the metaphor of an “inner community of selves,” I explore how we either preserve integrity or slip toward fragmentation.)
Deconstruction and Other Imitations of Maturity (Some good things can look like maturing, even though they are naturally incomplete processes – with the potential to either encourage growth or become dead ends.)
Contemplation
Contemplation as Being Held (Introducing contemplation as a practice that reconnects us with a primal “secure base” such as that of being held by a loving caregiver.)
The Deep Goodness of Contemplation (A look at all the goodness that comes through the wide diversity of contemplative practices that are possible.)
Holy Eavesdropping – and 1.1 (Sharing a way to picture a contemplative “listening in” to our “inner teacher” where a wise and compassionate conversation is happening.)
A Soft Heart in Hard Days (Contemplative help for staying “un-braced” even when the pain of life – or “The News” – seems too much to bear)
Interviews with Ukrainian Refugees
An early project in my sabbatical was interviewing Ukrainian refugees in Warsaw to see what factors contributed to healing from their trauma.
What I Learned by Listening to Ukrainian Refugees – Pt. 1Â (Some personal background and first observations from my interviews.)
What I Learned by Listening to Ukrainian Refugees – Pt. 2 (Noticing how professional care and treatment for refugees focused on “depression” more than “trauma” and wondering how this was linked to the ongoing nature of the trauma in Ukraine.)
What I Learned by Listening to Ukrainian Refugees – Pt. 3Â (The dilemma of providing an experience of safety for healing when the war is ongoing in Ukraine. Yet, healing can and does happen.)
A Summary
See the Pattern (At sabbatical’s end (6 months), I summarized some of the patterns I’d been tracing.)
Appendix – “Heart & Mind Contemplations”
As a bonus, some readers particularly appreciated the curated listening/reading experiences (that I’d hoped to do more of…). Here are the two provided so far, complete with a suggested contemplative approach:
Heart & Mind Contemplation #1 – Sitting with Death
Heart & Mind Contemplation #2 – Finding Courage