“Evolution is speeding up, not time. Consciousness is evolving, becoming aware of itself as creation's mentor. Children are evolution's front edge. They push at boundaries... challenge the status quo...irritate convention. That is their job...to set free all that sullies the human heart and blinds the mind to the relationship between the Creator and the Created." ~ P.M.H. Atwater~
MY WORK ... MY PASSION
• Certified Transpersonal Hypnotherapist ; Past experiences: Dream Analysis /10 Years Experience •Psychotherapist / Use of Gestalt, Jungian, Zen, Reality and Energy Therapies /10 Years Experience •EMDR • Men and Their Journey: the neuroscience of the male brain, and the implications in sexuality, education and relationship • Women: Their Transformation and Empowerment • ATOD (Alcohol, Tobacco and Other Drugs) / 21 years experience •Ordained Interfaith Minister & Official Celebrant • Social Justice Advocate • Child and Human Rights Advocate • Spiritual Guide and Intuitive • Certified Reiki Practitioner • Mediation / Conflict Resolution • “Intentional Love” Parenting Strategy Groups • Parenting Workshops • Coaching for parents of Indigo, Crystal, and Rainbow Children • International Training: Israel & England • Critical Incident Stress Debriefing • Post-911 and Post-Katrina volunteer
MSW - UNC Chapel Hill
BSW - UNC Greensboro
With immense love I wish Happy Birthday to my three grandchildren!
May 22: Brannock
May 30: Brinkley
June 12: Brogan
All three have birthdays in the same 22 days of the year ....what a busy time for the family!
"An Unending Love"
This blog and video is devoted and dedicated to my precious daughter Jennifer, my grand daughters Brogan and Brinkley, and my grand son Brannock. They are hearts of my heart. Our connection through many lives..... is utterly infinite.
The Definition of Genius
"THRIVE"
"ONLY LOVE PREVAILS" ...."I've loved you for a thousand years; I'll love you for a thousand more....."
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
We're threading hope like fire
Down through the desperate blood
Night falling on the city
Quite something to behold
Don't it just look so pretty
This disappearing world
This disappearing world
I'll be by your side
Hit 'em 'tween the eyes
Through the smoke and rising water
Cross the great divide
Baby till it all feels right
This disappearing world
This disappearing world
"The degree of our enlightenment is the degree of passion that we will have for the whole world." ~The Greystone Mandala
"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." ~ Winston Churchill
Kant: "We are not rich by what we possess, but what we can do without."
"A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires." ~ Paulo Coelho
“It is not the critic who counts,not the man who who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”Theodore Roosevelt
TECHNOLOGY..........
In “Conversations with God”, by Neale Donald Walsch, there is a warning I think of. I refer to it as the Atlantis passage, and I've quoted it a few times before." As I have said, this isn't the first time your civilization has been at this brink,"
God tells Walsch. "I want to repeat this, because it is vital that you hear this. Once before on your planet, the technology you developed was far greater than your ability to use it responsibly. You are approaching the same point in human history again. It is vitally important that you understand this. Your present technology is threatening to outstrip your ability to use it wisely. Your society is on the verge of becoming a product of your technology rather than your technology being a product of your society. When a society becomes a product of its own technology, it destroys itself."
Thursday, September 14, 2017
R.I.P. Gary...., M.D.
I write to you last of all. Of all these entries, I am certain you will "know" my message and my heart. I won't write much, because you are no longer here. A little over 50 years ago, and my memories are still strikingly vivid as then. After we met, I realized you had the deepest character in a man I had been exposed to. Your parenting of "Bug" was so poignant it was etched on my heart forever. My grief when both of you were called home was unfathomable. My"whys" broke my heart.
You had just graduated from med school, and your goals for that work were so amazing to me. It some some years to realize I was simply going to carry that in my breast as long as I was on this earth. As time goes along, I will add to this, but right now, you were a major loss in my life.......
For many years, I wanted to meet someone like you, but in all those years no one has ever possessed the ideals you worked so hard to develop, and then to pass on to Bug......Not ended.....
“I was in love with him. I knew that much was true. Love was the swelling, hopeful feeling in my chest every time I saw him. Love was the way I could forget about everything when I was with him. Love was the catch in my breath when he looked at me in his intense way. Love was the gasp he could draw out of me with the simplest of touches. Love was the way I could... I could be myself around him, know that I didn't need to be perfect or worry about what he was thinking, because he accepted me.”
― Jennifer L. Armentrout, The Problem with Forever
Jeff Brown - Bio
Once again...thank you to Jeff and his wisdom!
Attorney, psychotherapist
But a little voice deep inside me kept pulling me away from trial law, pulling me in another, initially hazier direction. This little voice carried a karmic blueprint for my destiny and whispered sweet somethings in my ear whenever I dared to walk a “false-path”. I heard it when I was planning my law practice, involved in an unhealthy relationship, sitting in traffic on the way to work: “No, not that way Jeffrey…walk this way.” Although it came through in hints and whispers, it had an odd sense of authority to it. A distant flute with the energy of a symphony.
After stepping back from law, I immediately began fixating on my future. Like many conditioned male warriors, I was determined to narrow the mystery of “true-path” down to career identity. If I could just explore every career that interested me, if I could just DO it all, I would clarify my identity in no time.
I soon learned. After only a few days of exploration, my unresolved emotional material burst through the defenses that had held me safe since childhood. I began to cry, and then rage, as one wave of emotion after another pushed on through, eager to be released from its primal bondage. My inner landscape was obstructed with congealed holdings, carryover remnants from an embattled, unresolved childhood. The Mystery began with my history. How to walk the path ahead, when our feet are still stumbling along old pathways? (Ah, the power of then).
After a nervous breakthrough of startling proportions, my focused warrior lay down his (bloody) arms, and surrendered to the reality that I had to go back down the path and re-claim my broken heart before I could begin to consider the question of career identity. Soon thereafter, I began to revisit my childhood, beginning at the hospital where I was born. I visited old schools, bakeries, racetracks, people I knew. I walked old neighbourhoods for hours at a time. I sat on old park benches. I bought and read old comic books. I went to the university library and looked through newspaper microfiche. I listened to old music. I stared at family pictures for hours.
Wherever I was, I went for the feeling. It wasn’t enough to know that I had been somewhere, I had to feel it in my bones. When I resisted, I meditated. I closed my eyes and envisioned the person or place. I kept at it until the veil came off and the emotional memory emerged. Then I would turn the page.
One of the primary issues that came clear during this phase was my fear of homelessness. I would sit across from apartment buildings that we had lived in and feel into the memories. Throughout my early life, my sense of security was undermined by evictions and by my mother’s repeated assertion that I wasn’t welcome in my own home. My muladhara- or root chakra- had never felt grounded and safe on Mother Earth.
With this in mind, I devoted many years to building an economic and domestic foundation for my life. That phase included the buying of a house in downtown Toronto, the growth of my student business into a solid enterprise, and a determined effort to fortify the boundary between myself and the chaos-mongers I had grown up with. Within this stable cocoon, I was able to ascend to the next stage in my evolution, exploring myself as a psychotherapist, completing an MA in Psychology, and beginning a career as an author. But, of course, the journey doesn’t end there. Just when you think the monster has died, he shows up on your doorstep begging to see you.
Last month, I made the decision to sell the house that I have lived in for fifteen solid years. With the publicity phase for my book at an end, I am ready to start writing a new book and I prefer to do that in the country. So I sold my house at a price that made living in the country affordable. All Go(o)d, until I purchased a new home that won’t be ready until three months after my current house closes.
Right after signing the waivers on the new property, I drove back to Toronto. While driving, I was overwhelmed by archaic anxieties, the emotional memories associated with a childhood with no fixed address. I pulled over to the side of the road to calm myself, but it was to no avail. The waves of anxiety deepened, as I was swept under by immobilizing fear. I flashed to memories of my Grandparents helping us pack, time and time again. My witness observer jumped to the fore “Just watch, just watch”, but he was swept under too, his meditation cushion bobbing in the shadowy depths.
I was right back in the heart of the primal terror, imagining myself in bus shelters, sleeping in my vehicle, riding a Greyhound across North America until the house was ready. Never mind the fact that I have the money to sublet an apartment, never mind that I have a whole soulpod of supporters to stay with, never mind the rational mind. I was awash in an ocean of hopelessness.
Sleepless in Toronto, I have surrendered to the wave for two weeks, alternating between packing up the house and unpacking my emotional baggage.
When I had begun to clear my emotional debris all those years ago, I swore that I would heal everything. My warrior did not understand the embodied nature of trauma, the ways that emotional material becomes cells in the bones of our being. Let alone did he understand the beauty of the shadow, the ways that repressed emotions can become actualized, spiritual lessons, the grist for our soul’s expansion. For him, for me, it was just a question of fighting our way through everything.
He was so wrong. Not to say that we cannot heal many of our wounds, but we cannot heal them all, not in one lifetime. As part of the journey, we may have to accept that certain wounds may never fade altogether. Perhaps healing is not always about killing the monster when he comes. Perhaps it is also about learning how to move forward despite him.
Today I briefly caught a glimpse of the gift of this moment. With my creative work moving so strongly into the world, I have been taking my press clippings to heart. I have been imagining myself beyond the fray, beyond the challenges and lessons of humanness. Something about this wave of emotional memory is pulling me back to (h)earth, and connecting me to the heart of the matter- my emotional life. This is where I lived for so long, at my familiar desk at The School of Heart Knocks. Sit down, Jeffrey, there is lots of home-work still to be done.
A former criminal lawyer and psychotherapist, Jeff Brown is the author of “Soulshaping: A Journey of Self-Creation,” endorsed by authors Elizabeth Lesser and Ram Dass. It is Brown’s autobiography; an inner travelogue of his journey from archetypal male warrior to a more surrendered path.
Tuesday, September 12, 2017
To: RCT! James Blunt - Goodbye My Lover [OFFICIAL VIDEO]
Thursday, September 7, 2017
Taking Responsibility for Our Lives by W. Mitchell
W. Mitchell, Inspirational Speaker
Tuesday, September 5, 2017
"The Other Side"....I'll see you then......
Poignant words .... and perfect ones. The pain of loss is deep, throughout the years ... throughout the decades.
"The Other Side"
I'll see you on the other side, see you on the other side
Honey now if I'm honest, I still don't know what love is
Another mirage folds into the haze of time recalled
And now the floodgates cannot hold
All my sorrow all my rage
A tear that falls on every page
Meet me on the other side, meet me on the other side
Maybe I oughta mention, was never my intention
To harm you or your kin, are you so scared to look within
The ghosts are crawling on our skin
We may race and we may run
We'll not undo what has been done
Or change the moment when it's gone
Meet me on the other side, meet me on the other side
I'll see you on the other side, see you on the other side
I know it would be outrageous
To come on all courageous
And offer you my hand
To pull you up on to dry land
When all I got is sinking sand
That trick ain't worth the time it buys
I'm sick of hearing my own lies
And love's a raven when it flies
Meet me on the other side, meet me on the other side
I'll see you on the other side, see you on the other side
Honey now if I'm honest, I still don't know what love is
Friday, September 1, 2017
Adele - When We Were Young (Live at The Church Studios)
For J.J.C.......so many years ago.........
From the way you talk
To the way you move
Everybody here is watching you
'Cause you feel like home
You're like a dream come true
But if by chance you're here alone
Can I have a moment
Before I go?
'Cause I've been by myself all night long
Hoping you're someone I used to know
You sound like a song
My God, this reminds me
Of when we were young
In case it is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realized
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless
It was just like a movie
It was just like a song
Nobody told me that you'd be here
And I swore you moved overseas
That's what you said, when you left me
You still sound like a song
My God, this reminds me
Of when we were young
In case it is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realized
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless
It was just like a movie
It was just like a song
When we were young
When we were young
When we were young
Everything just takes me back
To when you were there
To when you were there
And a part of me keeps holding on
Just in case it hasn't gone
I guess I still care
Do you still care?
It was just like a song
My God, this reminds me
Of when we were young
When we were young
When we were young
When we were young
In case it is the last time
That we might be exactly like we were
Before we realized
We were sad of getting old
It made us restless
Oh, I'm so mad I'm getting old
It was just like a movie
It was just like a song
When we were young
Thoughts on Adele
Many of her changeups are remarkable....these bring tears to my eyes.
When she was to perform 4 concerts at Wembley..(the best of the best!!), she apparently injured her voice. No small wonder! Her chords and expression are the exquisite tools of a master. At the end of that tour...well, her letter to the ticket holders (below) one evening is below. Adele uses her voice, not pre-recordings that one lip-syncs. I thought this was a typical gesture for Adele.
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Tuesday, August 22, 2017
The Ties Between Crime and Malignant Narcissism/ by Rebecca Lee
The Ties Between Crime and Malignant Narcissism
~ 2 min read
Pathological lying is another obvious trait of malignant narcissism. Ted Bundy lied about his killings to various professionals, but not to be considered innocent. For example, he told one psychologist that he started killing women in 1974, but later he said the killing started in 1969. At one point, Bundy said there were 35 victims in all, but in another setting he claimed over 100. The criminal investigation reports that Ted Bundy seemed to be lying to impress people rather than avoid jail. Many times he said the deaths of the women he killed were higher than the victims reported.
Perhaps the most terrifying symptom of malignant narcissism is the lack of empathy that is required to carry out behavior. OJ Simpson frequently called his wife fat while she was pregnant. This was explained with the charisma of someone who was just “joking around.” Looking closer, this was not an isolated incident. He frequently beat his wife as well as publicly humiliated her by having affairs. When his wife was murdered, he seemed uninterested in his children, focusing more on himself. It is hard to prove that someone does not have empathy especially if that person is highly charismatic.
The warning signs of involvement with someone who may be afflicted are as follows:
- Success At Any Cost. A close inspection of past relationships may show a failure to treat people kindly for the promise of a grandiose, yet superficial success. Beware of flaunted expenses, especially if there are a lack of people to share in the enjoyment.
- Narcissists may be hypersexual, often in relation to power and control. Incest is frequently reported as well as a lack of regard for partner and boundaries.
- Incessant Blaming. Lack of personal responsibility is a key sign. Often a narcissist will play ‘the victim’ even when he/she has hurt someone else.
- Violence. Since their ego is so fragile to begin with, any criticism received feels like an attack. They fight back much harder than what is doled out. Someone who uses violence frequently, demonstrates lack of impulse control and may also have multiple addictions.
- Manipulation. Pitting people against one another for the ultimate goal of loyalty is often used by narcissists. In this case, loyalty often means isolation.
Wednesday, August 2, 2017
Thursday, July 20, 2017
Critical Thinking: Where, oh where, have you gone?
One of my favorite observations from teaching undergraduate critical thinking (as I noted in my last post) is that even though students claim to, they often don’t know what educators mean by "critical thinking." Even so, there is a tendency for students to nod their heads in agreement with whatever educators say, because hey, no one wants to look foolish! We see this behavior quite often in the classroom.
Nothing. Not a single hand. Maybe, there genuinely are no questions. However, in larger classrooms, with over 100 people, this is probably not the case—there’s bound to be at least one question. In my opinion, if a student has a question, it makes them look smarter to ask it. It is in their interest to do so, particularly if they don’t understand what is being discussed. Still, questions often go unasked, perhaps, because of shyness or uncertainty. When hands do go up, there are generally very few of them. No one wants to stand out and look like they don’t get it, especially if no one else is raising their hand. Thus, some might just be sitting there, still wondering, “What do you mean by critical thinking?”
Even moderate drinking can damage the brain - current research
The silent damage from drinking moderately down the decades
Even moderate drinking could harm the brain.
Moderate drinking leads to severe brain damage.