It’s no secret that everyone wants to know a secret. We are all trying to make sense of things, as if to deny that we exist in a wide ocean of mystery. We are steeped in mystery, we are made…

I’ve been thinking of Dumbo lately. It began a few days ago, when I was suddenly struck by an old childhood image of the baby elephant with big ears. Once I had that picture in my head I just couldn’t…

In any discussion about emotions, it’s important to recognize the distinction between human emotion and emotional drama. Let’s face it; the two have been fatally linked throughout most of human history. The body is a factory for emotions. It’s one…

Think back on the childhood friends who liked to steer you into trouble. Maybe you avoided kids like that, or maybe you were one of them. In everyone’s childhood, there was always at least one kid who recruited others in…

In the course of a dinner with two friends not long ago, I was struck by a spiritually motivated conversation about the virtues of ‘giving up.’ Both men seemed to agree that surrender was a good thing from all points…

From the earliest days of our domestication we have learned to follow the rules of the human dream. Obeying the command of adolescent rebellion, we occasionally defied those rules and got hurt in the process. Maybe the lesson we learned…

As much as I would love my students to share their personal revelations as a way of teaching themselves, it happens less and less often. For students of this Toltec teaching, sharing their revelations with a community of like minds…

I am curious. I have a feeling we were all born to be curious, but we lose our curiosity when it looks like we’ve accumulated all the knowledge we will ever really need. That usually happens within our first four…

Early in January a few years ago, someone asked me if I’d made any New Year’s resolutions. It had been a long time since I’d heard that kind of question, so I suppose I didn’t hear the unspoken invitation to…

The Nativity As with all stories that arise from the wellspring of human imagination, the Nativity tells the story of us. We are storytellers, of course, but we are also the Only Story we know how to tell. From fairy…