The Student/Teacher Relationship

The Purpose The role of the spiritual teacher or guru is to mirror and reflect the true nature of awareness. The teacher’s presence should remind the student of their own essential nature. It is the love for the guru and the freedom that he/she represents, that triggers the unfolding of the spiritual journey. The whole…

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Now is the Time to Turn Up the Light

I am standing in a long line waiting to vote again in the GA Senate run-offs. The stakes are a little different now from my last long wait line, and although the wait is not quite the valiant 5 hours I stood to vote for the 2020 general elections, it is still long and just…

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Healing the Communal Heart

This is an intense time. Once again we face the reality of a world fragmented, polarized and terrorized by issues of blatant self-interest, lack of respect, lack of recognition or caring about differing perspectives, of disempowerment, and of the trampled dreams of those deemed lesser or other.  Because everything is interconnected, local as well as…

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Secrets of the Soul

Although the current scientific consensus is that there is no evidence to support the existence of the traditional definition of the soul as the spiritual breath of the body, most people believe they have some form of a soul. And yet ‘soul’ is hard to define and there is distinction and disagreement amongst different religions…

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Re-calibrating after a series of upheavals

Suddenly it’s December. So many of us thought the world would look different. Politically of course we are entering a strange unknown. Not sure what to expect. We have a president-elect who seems not sure of his own agenda, or his sense of self. And he is filling his cabinet with military men and business…

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Peacemaking: The Challenge of our Modern World

My dear friend, Shahabuddin David Less is in Israel at the moment meeting with the Peacemakers of the Abrahamic Reunion. Amongst others, he recently visited Elias Jabour, a seventh generation practitioner of “Sulha”, the traditional peacemaking formula of the Middle East. Sulha means ‘agreeable amends’, the making of peace. During the “Sulha” process one literally…

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My next book…

Cool title, but I’m keeping under wraps for a little while… I’m turning my Doctoral dissertation from the dry academic format required by the Doctoral Academy, into a yummy exposition of the amazing group of people I interviewed – children whose parents were renowned spiritual teachers…their lives and their experiences growing up with such illustrious…

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Memorial Day

Given that it’s Memorial Day, a day to honor those who have given their all for something they believed in, I had a moment to think about what I would fight to protect. I was brought up in South Africa at the height of the Apartheid years. As a young kid it was easy to…

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Spirituality and Relationships

I was asked to contribute to a book a friend is writing on Radical Acceptance in relationships and it made me think about how the different religious and spiritual paradigms would approach such a question. It seems clear that they would do so in relation to their core values and teachings, so I put together…

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