The Awakened Self

Do you remember your dreams? Or do you simply awaken in the morning knowing that you dreamed but have no idea what it was about? Then, there are those dreams you can’t forget…ever. They stick with us and at times when we have a flash of a vision, we wonder if that was a fragment of memory from something that actually happened to us in our waking hours or was it from our dreamscape? Even in our sle...

As a Chinese tradition, prior to the new year, our families would close out the old year by having a simple sit-down family meal together and declaring that we are closing out the old year with that meal. I always liked the idea of that because it meant that the year behind us with all its ups and downs, the good and bad…that it was all now being closed out so we could welcome in the new year. Sor...

How do we navigate our lives in a way that feels balanced between caring for ourselves and caring for others? Gender roles assign most of the care-taking to females, but that line is blurred now with men being “allowed” and encouraged to share equally in child-rearing situations without threatening their sense of masculinity. I used the word “allowed” purposefully because in earlier days it was no...

Are you stressed? The world and our individual lives can fill us with a sense of dread and foreboding, but how we filter that input makes a big difference in our response to stress. Are we reacting or responding? There is a difference. In the former, I am acting from my hind brain…simply having a reaction that is likely primed from past situations I’ve been in. There is no intervention with mindfu...

Halloween is almost here and so many people are excited to get their costumes together and for a night, to be someone or something else. It’s a great tradition and allows our alter ego to shine. Maybe we even celebrate for a few days leading up to the big night, but we know that it is simply a costume and that we are still ourselves underneath the wigs, clothes, props and masks we wear for this ho...

Being human is to be a social creature. In order for our brain to develop to its fullest capacity depends upon the types of interactions we had with others while we were developing, especially those interactions with our primary caretakers. The field of Interpersonal Neurobiology is providing insight into the effects of interpersonal interactions and their subsequent impact on the brain’s physiolo...

Be “aware” of your thoughts and words… Many of us can remember using that phrase, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me!” We felt protected by that phrase. When kids called us names, we could shout out that phrase and feel that we had diffused the effects of what they had said. Like magic, we had turned hurtful words into nothing. Wasn’t it great being a kid? Fast forw...

Death. Dying. Two different aspects of the same process. Dying is a process while death is the final result. What will it be like to die? Is there a way to make this passage easier? For both the person dying and the loved ones being left behind? Will our death be sudden or a protracted process? No one knows. Either way, there is so much to explore about these questions: 1) What will it be like to...

What are you thinking about right now? Are your thoughts on the moment or are they ruminating about the past? Is your focus trained towards the future? There is little argument that human minds are filled with what William James called our “stream of consciousness.” Do our thoughts have anything to do with what we call our reality? In other words, do we somehow create our own reality and if so, ho...

In one of my earlier episodes I mentioned Anne Lamott. She wrote, “I have just always found it extremely hard to be here, on this side of eternity, because of, well, other people; and death.”  That last one…death. That always gets us, doesn’t it? Yet note that Marcus Aurelius wrote that it is not death we need to fear, but we should fear never having lived.  “I’m living every day!” you say. Well,...

What does it mean, to evolve through relationships? In this article, we will explore how the dynamics of relationships can form a testing ground for how much we have grown or evolved. It is within the interactions we have with our partners where we can discover our unfinished business. We can become aware of how we may be carrying forth old stories, wounds, and trauma into the current situation wh...

Mindfulness is a meditative technique that results in a suspension of our preformed notions or expectations of experience. Full consciousness is channeled towards the present moment instead of focusing on the past or future. We train our minds to become aware of when we are NOT being present. When I trained in mindfulness with UC Davis emeritus professor, Dr. Charles Tart we were at a workshop in...

Reading Anne Lamott’s book, Almost Everything, I am dazzled by her naked honest truthful way of writing about her experiences, thoughts, feelings, and hopes. She wrote, “I have just always found it extremely hard to be here, on this side of eternity, because of, well, other people; and death.” Heavy. How many of us have felt that way about our journey? To be aware of that challenge and to not succ...

I was a tenured professor of psychology from 1991-2012. Since my retirement in 2012, I continued to teach various psychology classes online until 2018 when I finally stopped working for the college and embarked on a more intensive personal journey to consolidate what I had learned over the years. Psychology provided me the platform to explore human consciousness and what it means to evolve our con...

Hi Everyone! First of all, let me thank you for your interest in my articles. That means a lot to me. And if you are subscribed to the Awakened Self Substack, many blessings. Starting any new journey is filled with excitement and anxiety, wondering how it will unfold and what it will lead to. Substack has allowed me to continue to teach what I have learned in my years as a professor of psychology,...