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Fear is the cheapest room in the house

A member of my extended family is seriously ill. The past few days have been touch and go. She is in her early thirties. I've been feeling a shudder of fear in my body. Fear: an easy place for my mind to go at a time like this, but not the place I want to stay. Below are a quote and reflection from my 2014 book The Inconceivable Surprise of Living that I reread this week. Sometimes it's good for an author to heed his own words! Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions. Hafiz (translated by Daniel Ladinsky) The first apartment I ever rented was a two-room efficiency in a large, old house in a run-down part of town that had been split into sev

I'm mentally ill sometimes

After baring his soul to me for most of an hour, a patient cocked his head, screwed up his face, and asked, "Am I crazy?" Usually when people apply that word to themselves, I reassure them that I never use it. Calling ourselves or our lives crazy is generally not a practice of self-compassion. On this afternoon, however, a more playful response came to me. "Yes, I think you are crazy," I told him, "in the way that we are all crazy when we are living from the small self—the version of us that is prone to fifty times fifty shades of shadow energy: inadequacy, comparison, self-doubt, fear, depression, anger, blaming, craving, boredom, addiction and so on. The small self is a pretty crazy place,

The Forgotten Vow

“...to honor and love all the days of my life.” Though many couples choose to write their own vows these days, this old language still captures what most couples hope for. But love gets all the glory. It is the focus of the hit songs, the romantic movies, the classic poems. Honoring is the forgotten vow. In over thirty years of working with couples in distress, I rarely consider an absence of love the primary problem. Lack of honoring is what undermines love. Sometimes the honoring breach is shattering: someone breaks a sacred trust by not “forsaking all others” (more old language). As painful as affairs are, by far the more common problem with honoring is day-to-day habits of failing to tre

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Fear is the cheapest room in the house

I'm mentally ill sometimes

The Forgotten Vow

The cloud of unknowing

I'm nobody, who are you?

This question could save a life

Reflections on a wren's nest

Faith fires

The hose, the reservoir, and the salmon

Beyond worship: An Easter reflection

On showing up

Ten sources of our inner "dis-ease"

Now this? Radical acceptance revisited

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