Panic and Panic Disorder
What is the difference between a panic attack and panic disorder? Many of us have had an isolated panic attack, without it developing into something more, and mostly it doesn't. What is the difference between high anxiety and panic? It's not always clear, but often there is a strong sense of losing control, a sense of being totally overwhelmed by the intensity of the fear, which is not characteristic of everyday anxiety, at least not as much. For some of us, the fear of havin
Feb 167 min read
Emptiness: deficient or liberating?
"And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you" ~ Nietzsche “People are scared to empty their minds fearing that they will be engulfed by the void. What they don’t realize is that their own mind is the void.” ~ Huang Po You may have heard that Buddhism, at least in some of its schools, stresses the "emptiness" of phenomena. This may not seem a very appetizing goal for the spiritual life, so I thought I'd explain this a bit. In one of my other blog posts, I
Jun 236 min read
Welcoming everything in our experience - a report from a recent retreat
Meditation Room, Serenity Ridge, Shipman Va Just back from a meditation retreat in the tradition of Tibetan Dzogchen Buddhism. It still amazes me that a spiritual tradition originating over 2500 years ago can still hold so much relevance to us today. Though Tibetan Buddhism is of course a religious tradition, this is not at all about being a Buddhist (or not), it is about the psychological ideas and practices that have survived for so long, with good reason. According to the
May 115 min read
