“A genuine spiritual path does not avoid difficulties or mistakes but leads us to the art of making mistakes wakefully, bringing them to the transformative power of our heart.” –Jack Kornfield

Your ego is an instrument, a tool, the primitive leveraging mechanism of the self. Some would even say it is the self. It is there to balance (master) or dissociate (disaster) our unique energy with the primordial energy of the cosmos. It is forever in the throes of connection and disconnection, of attachment and detachment, torn between finitude and infinity. When the ego is being used to dissociate, its energy is codependent and it is torn between bemoaning the past and being anxious about the future.

“Every human culture, to remain healthy, sustainable, and vibrant, requires a constant renewal of ceremonies, crafts, cultural practices, and the arts. Each society must generate new knowledge, skills, self-understanding, and modes of self-transcendence. To evolve, a human community must have available a diverse set of authentic and viable social forms that enables it to respond to shifting times, long-term weather patterns, food sources, spiritual needs, cultural longings, and relations with other human groups.” –Bill Plotkin

Egalitarianism is a type of social system that has worked for human beings for millions of years, and it has a very adaptive effect in human evolution. Anthropologist Christopher Boehm has proposed a social theory that hunter-gatherers maintained equality through a leveling mechanism he calls Reverse Dominance: a social system of checks and balances that maintains egalitarian ethos while preventing a dominance hierarchy from forming. In his 1999 book, Hierarchy in the Forest, Boehm offers compelling evidence for his reverse dominance theory. In this article we will analyze this social theory and see how we might be able to use it to improve things within our own social environments.

“The old gods are dead or dying and people everywhere are searching, asking: What is the new mythology to be, the mythology of this unified earth as of one harmonious being?” –Joseph Campbell

All of life is a meditation, whether we are aware of it or not. Put even more succinctly, life is a meditative mythology. We are, each of us, walking, talking myth-machines going through the motions of our mythological projections. In any given culture, we are the hardware, and mythology is the software.

We are naturally creatures of myth. It’s a human need to be told stories, and to tell them. Joseph Campbell described mythology as having four basic functions: the Mystical Function: experiencing the awe of the universe; the Cosmological Function: explaining the shape and image of the universe; the Sociological Function: supporting and validating a certain social order; and the Psychological (pedagogical) Function: how to live a human lifetime under any circumstances.

“Breathing in, I know the anger is in me. Breathing out, I will take good care of my anger.” ~ Thich Nhat Hanh, ‘Is Nothing Something’.

As a society we are becoming increasingly familiar with the agreement that meditation is as beneficial to children as it is to adults, bringing about greater degrees of relaxation and self-reflection from an early age. But the kind of meditation we might use when teaching our children how to be peaceful warriors will effectively take quite a different shape to the ones we’re familiar with and can require time and wisdom to get the right one for your child.

Traditional Vipassana and ‘breathing’ exercises, though excellent tools to teach, (as, after all, breathing is the one thing we all have in common), can seem a little abstract or hard to grasp...

“True love is the complete victory of the particular over the general, and the unconditional over the conditional.” – Naseem Nicholas Taleb

We are all scientists, trying to make sense of the love inside us. Most things exist along a rollercoaster ride of degrees. So it is also with love. Our definitions of love are not as black and white as we’d like them to be, they’re ambiguously gray and often imprecise. The border around our idea of love is mostly an illusion, permeable and ever-changing; more like a horizon than a boundary. There are, after all, over seven billion of us on this planet, and we each have our own unique psycho-physiological perception of what love means.