A confused poem on Babel and other unspeakable wounds — fear and trembling at the foot of the tower of Babel where the ground sinks beneath your feet and there are no ears to hear the words we could not speak even if we wanted to as our wounds gape and run even in their irrecoverable hiddenness and the angels…

Notes on meditation, trauma, and healing — “It could be that, when brain activity is desynchronised in this way [during meditation], our brains can’t build a coherent model of the world anymore. The way we experience the world is thought by some scientists to come from predictions we’re making based on experience — called predictive processing. The…

On the (mis)use of our most fundamental skill — “An entire mythology is stored within our language.” “The limits of my language means the limits of my world.” ― Ludwig Wittgenstein We use language as a spider does a web: it’s not about “objectivity” or mere description, but engaging our inner and outer world. New terms, concepts, beliefs can…

Self-Inquiry in an Interpersonal World — In ancient Vedic thought, the cosmos is — or at least may be compared to — a net filled with jewels. This net of jewels was crafted by Indra, king of divine beings, who is said to have vanquished every adversary of humanity — which is to say that his…

Trauma and Healing in Religion — I was raised a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, separated from the LDS Church due in part to traumatic experiences as a missionary, and currently find myself something of a “none” as far as demographics are concerned. Despite the fact that I do not align…

My first Pride Month out of the closet — Last month I came out as pansexual, which means this will be my first Pride Month out of the closet. This being my first Pride Month open and out, and with my Marriage & Family Therapy graduate program beginning soon, I find myself reflecting on what kind of therapist and…

On Touching Enlightenment with the Body — I recently finished reading Reginald Ray’s Touching Enlightenment: Finding Realization in the Body and I’ve started Willa Baker’s The Wakeful Body: Somatic Mindfulness as a Path to Freedom, and their somatic approach to Buddhism has radically altered how I think about meditation and the insights it can bring. I think…

Challenges and Theories — Humans share numerous similarities in their emotions, but mental disorders appear to be substantially shaped by cultural context. Cultural Psychology presents hikikomori, acute social withdrawal, as a uniquely Japanese phenomenon. Though similar to disorders like agoraphobia, hikikomori appears to be outside the categories of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of…

Surgery, Specialization, Splitting — Whether one subscribes to a dualistic distinction between or a monistic equivocation of the brain and the self, the human brain plays a central role in the mysteries of human experience. As such, neuroscience is a pivotal interlocutor in conversations on phenomenology and consciousness. For example, one may consider the…