You finish your coffee with a friend, rise and say your good-byes. As you exit the cafe something extraordinary occurs; something that almost always goes unnoticed. The focus of the entire universe gets up and goes with you. Like a spotlit actor moving across the stage, the universal spotlight remains fixed on you. Did you [...]

As a miserable teen I developed quite a crush on the self-help industry. On my darker days I could be found poring over the works of the industry’s earliest progenitors – Napoleon Hill, Dale Carnegie, Mary Baker Eddy, Norman Vincent Peale. Later, I moved on to their modern-day successors – Wayne Dyer, Steven Covey, Tony [...]

Be gentle with yourself. It was a 'message' I received a few years ago during an attempted meditation that was going something like this: "Why do you always screw up your relationships? What is wrong with you? Here we go again, idiot!" You get the idea. And then something arose suddenly and completely and serenely [...]

Live long enough and at some point all of us will find ourselves close to someone in profound pain. We’re not talking garden-variety suffering here. We’re talking about serious addiction, self-mutilation, suicidal despondency. Almost always we are talking about the end-point culmination of years of accumulated pain. There are no more tomorrows, the body is [...]

The 4 a.m. anxiety wake-up call. Shit, not again. The mental engine sparks to life and like that the mind is a whirl of anxious thoughts and fears about this person or that, regrets about the past, apprehension about the future, money, kids, health. It's as if they've been waiting there in the darker corners [...]

Speaking with a neighbor the other day, I envied news of his beach home in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Until, that is, he confessed with a sigh, “Most summers we find it difficult to go.” The reason? His children’s ridiculously complicated schedules. Turns out his daughters, neither yet 10 years of age, were heavily booked [...]

A lot of people go for a walk or run to decompress, to blow off steam, to regroup. I’ve been doing that of late as well, but with a twist: Instead of spending the time looking at that which stresses me, I’m redirecting the gaze at that which is experiencing the stress. After all, if [...]

Several years ago, at the absolute depths of my personal crisis, a horrendous and hideous thought suddenly occurred to me: What if there is no God? What if this entire existence is … meaningless? What if all of the suffering and anguish and turmoil – not just within me, but in the world itself – [...]

Today is my 47th birthday and to celebrate I want to share with you three gifts that have made a big difference in my life and perhaps will in yours as well. The first is my personal "Bible" if you will, a book by the late Robert Adams entitled "Silence of the Heart." It is [...]

In a classic scene from “Young Frankenstein,” Igor is dispatched to snatch from a laboratory the brain of a recently deceased genius as the final ingredient in Dr. Frankenstein’s reanimation project. Brought to life, however, the monster behaves in a deranged fashion, prompting Frankenstein to ask Igor to repeat the name on the jar from [...]