RE- or DE-? Theoughout my favorite film of all time “Magnolia”, written and directed by my favorite director of all time Paul Thomas Anderson, the narrator repeats the phrase “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us.” As the Holistic Psychologist, Dr. Nicole LaPera…

UNNECESSARY In A.S. Neill’s incredible, highly-recommended-that-you-read book ‘Summerhill; A Radical Approach to Child Rearing’ he writes, “Punishment is always an act of hate. In the act of punishing the teacher or parent is hating the child — and the child realizes it. …

BREAK A LEG Trauma, deficiency stories and thus addiction and codependence (among other things) go all the way up both sides of my family tree. I discovered what ‘alcoholism’ was (though I didn’t yet understand its pervasiveness or what it meant) in my early teens when two of my grandparents…

NO MEASURE OF HEALTH “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. We have lost it, or we have never had it; and, because we do not know how to judge anything, we have been led here and pushed there, beaten up, driven…

LOSE TO FIND I had an awesome sponsor in Alanon years ago who once asked me “Dan, between the master electrician who’s studied and implemented his craft for years and the completely uncolonized indigenous man who gets struck by lightning, who do you think has a deeper understanding of electricity?” …

IT’S ALL RELATIVE Eckhart Tolle defines the ego as a “mind-made false sense of self”. Early on as a kid I remember feeling silly answering “Dan(?)” when folks would ask me my name. I’d respond with a hint of “so they tell me…?” in it as if I wasn’t quite…

PERMISSION Sometimes we just need permission. Permission to question, to change our minds, to leave, to stay, to go, to be, to “fail” or “make mistakes”, to martyr and abuse ourselves or to do what we want in our hearts. That’s all unconditional love is at the end of the…

A HELL OF A DRUG Contrary to what we’ve been programmed/conditioned to believe about life, we don’t suffer for no reason/in a vacuum. As kids surrounded by mostly unconscious suffering adults many of us learned to get what we thought we wanted or needed through suffering ourselves. For instance when…

DIE BEFORE YOU DIE In high school I can remember just starting to pick up on the vague sense I had that I was a fraud; that I wasn’t who I thought I was. It was like subtly being compelled or trapped into having to show up in a certain…