In Dark Night of the Soul: The Medium of Darknesss I summarized the two essential stages of spiritual transformation described by St. John of the Cross. In the first stage, purification of the senses, we strive to release ourselves from sensory entanglement in order to develop our capacity for contemplation. Controlling our senses and their addictive craving toward transient forms of satisfaction creates the possibility of contemplation and is prerequisite to the second stage, purification of the spirit. Spiritual purification, lasting years, is according to John of the Cross, a significantly more difficult and challenging experience. Frequently, spiritual seekers fail to complete the first stage with success. What precisely is the nature of learning in the midst of a dark night of the soul? Is there a mode of learning that is distinctly spiritual?
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[Exploring Life]The extent to which we fall prey to our own delusions can sometimes be quite surprising. A delusion is a false belief that has been accepted as fact, and is quite resistant to reason or common sense. Multitasking is both a delusion and a form of intellectual erosion; it is not a skill to be developed nor a desired quality of mind. While there may be situations and circumstances that require a rapid shifting of attention from one thing to another, chronic multi-tasking results in a degradation of the mind. That degradation is expressed as a loss in the power of concentration and attention.
A dark night of the soul is a kind of learning environment or medium for transformation. We learn about ourselves in the darkness through contemplation. In this sense, suffering is a phenomenon that must be fully inhabited in order to acquire its message. The tools of the darkness are loneliness, solitude, sensory aridity, disillusionment, isolation, and desolation. Darkness is a medium of suffering that our body, mind and spirit become immersed in with the purpose of transformation. St. John of the Cross refers to two kinds of darkness within a dark night of the soul. The first kind of darkness, the night of sense, the soul is purified, while in the second kind of darkness, the night of the spirit, the spirit is purged and prepared for union with God.
In order to better understand the nature and purpose of a 
[Exploring Life] Darkness means an absence of or deficiency of light. It creates places in which the fragility of our own perception becomes uncomfortably apparent. Darkness immerses us in the unknown and renders our beliefs inadequate. Our soul is the space where meaning and relationship are forged. Far more vast and mysterious than the mind, the soul animates existence. The soul is the origin and essence of our energetic presence in the world. On a dark night, when the veil of darkness merges with the source of our existence, the underlying ground of our being begins to move – and we feel abandoned. This sense of abandonment is not that which is created by lost friends or a lack of company; we have lost ourself in the midst of darkness. On a dark night we are embraced by a solitude of being in which we feel uneasy and removed from our own sense of identity. On a dark night, we reach a crossroad in which we can no longer be who we were and yet do not know who we are. A dark night of the soul is not merely an identity crisis, it is the sudden absence of identity and an absolute loss of self. A dark night of the soul is the essence of suffering, meaning, value, relationship, and personal transformation.
How much of our experience is driven by involuntary tendencies and habits? Understanding the nature and essence of habit in our lives is an essential task. Habits are both inevitable and unavoidable. They are a medium of perception; a complex network of filters that influence how we interpret and orient ourselves to everyday life. The effect of an involuntary pattern of behavior can be positive or negative. However, for learning to evolve we must be fully aware of and develop the ability to evolve the habits that influence us.
[Exploring Life] Aristotle posed the question, How should a human being lead his life? It is a universal question that touches every human life on the planet. For some, the question visits us only once in a while; for other, it relentlessly pursues our attention and demands intimacy. In 
[Exploring Life] The word psychosomatic describes a kind of influence or effect that the mind can have on the body, or the body can have on the mind. For example, psychosomatic medicine focuses on diseases or physical disorders that are thought to originate within our thoughts and emotions. An emotion that becomes habitual will manifest as a physiological reality within the body. Positive emotions can be defined as those emotions having a beneficial effect on our physiology, while negative motions are degenerative and lead to disorders and disease. In 
[Exploring Life] The body is designed to be in motion. In 
[Exploring Life] One of the most important principles in a functional fitness program is the even, coordinated development of the muscles. Unfortunately, many exercise programs tend to treat muscles as if they exist in isolation. Strength exercises that isolate muscles can be dysfunctional with respect to the proper functioning of the body. Balanced muscle development is essential to the proper functioning of joints. Uneven muscle development can actually be the cause of joint misalignment, which in turn leads to chronic inflammation and eventually degenerative disease. Catherine Guthrie’s 
[Exploring Life] Brad Stone’s NY Times article 
[Exploring Life] One of the greatest failures of lifelong learning is to live an unlived life, or a life that in hindsight is filled with regret. How many of us in the twilight years of our life look back on it and feel a sense of loss? It is not that we don’t know we will die, but it is that we choose to ignore that glaringly obvious reality. Perhaps it is simply too uncomfortable. Perhaps we have simply become too insensitive to the experience of being alive. Or is it that we are just too busy? Are we too afraid to face death and dying? The reasons for the avoidance of our own impermanence vary, but the failure in learning remains constant – any failure to orient learning toward the inevitability of death and dying confines our experience of life to the mundane. The following poem resonates the essential value that a healthy orientation toward death can bring to our learning and life…
[Exploring Life] The word diet is commonly associated with methods of restricting food intake in order to lose weight. Adjectives are used to promote a particular dietary style. For example a low carbohydrate diet implies a restriction on the intake of a particular class of food in order to lose weight. Another more important sense of the word refers to a prescribed selection of foods that form the basis for healthy eating. Dr. Andrew Weil’s 
[Exploring Life] What we eat has a direct and immediate affect on how we behave. Though we may practice relaxation, mindfulness, and meditation in order to foster a sense of equanimity in our body and mind, we completely undermine our efforts by eating food additives (i.e. – chemical additives that are not really food) and junk food (i.e. – high sugar content and starchy carbohydrates). It is curious to note that as a field of study psychology and its offspring tend to ignore the essential role that nutrition plays in mental health and well being. Instead, pharmaceutical drugs are prescribed, while dietary changes often remain ignored.
[Exploring Life] In 
[Exploring Life]In 
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[Exploring Life] What is the essence of spiritual learning? Is there an ideal program, course of study, or methodology? In 
[Exploring Life] When we become entrenched in our conceptual orientation to the world we limit our ability to perceive and apprehend it from different perspectives. All concepts are, at best, assumptions about reality. Any concept is therefore something less than reality itself. At the same time, we use concepts to construct meaning. If our minds habitually interpret experience through a limited conceptual framework, we live in a mindless manner. The idea of non-conceptual awareness invites us to consider the possibility of being in the world in way that seeks to challenge our own conceptual addictions and assumptions in order to cultivate new perspectives and possibilities for experience.
Recent Entries
- Dark Night of the Soul: Is There a Spiritual Mode of Learning?
- Mental Degradation: Multitasking
- Dark Night of the Soul: The Medium of Darkness
- Dark Night of the Soul: Spiritual Imperfections
- Dark Night of the Soul: On a dark night…
- Habit: Involuntary Circular Routines
- Meaning: What should I do with my life?
- Psychosomatics: The Heart of Anger
- Cultural Conditioning: Mobile vs. Sendentary Lifestyle
- Functional Fitness: Functional vs. Dysfunction Exercise