Writing
Mystical musings for the professional adept
The Merchant’s Code: Ethics of Goodness
My upbringing gave me a very strong narrative about business: it’s corrupt and corrupts good people. It took me many years to unwind this story and reintegrate the archetype of the Merchant back into my worldview and life. It’s been a great lifeline for me, when I’m feeling like a shy artist, or entrepreneurial imposter, […]
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Launch Before You’re Ready
You probably have an idea that you haven’t made and shared yet. I don’t know exactly what it is, but if you think about it, you probably have a bunch of reasons why it’s not time to share it with the world yet. Maybe it’s an idea for a course you...
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The Eternal Mechanism of the Heart
It began to dawn on me, the innocence of my heart. I was biking home from a date with a woman. It was sweet. Surprising. Confronting. I’d fallen for something in her. And then I’d got a little burned. More than my rational mind said was...
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The Sin of Our Times, Part 2: The Lost Technology of Spiritual Transformation
In the first part of this article I talked about shame and how we’re carrying so much of it, and that it is the root of sin. Not in some old clichéd Catholic sense, where we come from some original bad stock. We’re ashamed because we’re struggling...
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The Sin of Our Times, Part 1: The Anatomy of Shame
We’ve thrown out sin. It’s gone, along with religious guilt, dogma and other old dusty concepts that clash with our modern sense of freedom. It’s gone because it was a moral label from a by-gone past. Or at least, that’s what we think. But I’m...
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Revealing the Masks we Wear
I was reading Brené Brown again the other morning as I was eating scrambled eggs with avocado. Brené (I don’t actually know her so as to be on a first name basis, but like to pretend I do) was talking about barriers to vulnerability. She was...
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The Beauty of Authentic Ignorance
I remember years ago, being in a room with a spiritual teacher. A friend and I had organized a workshop with him. He was a very wise man. Towards the end of our evening, a guy put up his hand to ask a question. “Terry, I wake up every morning, and...
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The Marketer Who Cried Wolf
There’s a very old story. A shepherd boy is bored tending his sheep, and so to amuse himself, he shouts ‘Wolf, Wolf!” And the villagers come running to save him, and discover it was a ruse. And he laughs. And then he does it again, and they still...
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5 Lessons from a Year of Writing
When people ask me what I do, I say “I’m a writer.” Though that declaration is relatively recent, my history of writing is not. I wrote my first poem at age 7. I posted it on facebook recently – it got more likes than my contemporary writing. I...
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Stepping into the Heart of Courage
Brene Brown said it best. “You can’t get to courage without walking through vulnerability.” If you go up to somebody who is in the midst of taking courageous action, and you ask “how do you feel?” they probably won’t say “I feel courageous”....
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