As I write this, I’m gearing up for a modest book tour to promote my new work Ageless Soul. Whenever I write a book, I look for fresh insight into the theme. Insights are not easy to come by and take a lot of reading over a range of genres and authors, solid conversations with friends, and a background of good teachers and mentors. The modern taste for quantified research doesn’t appeal to me, mainly because it isn’t aimed at... Read more

I’m the opposite of a Jock, whatever that would be, though I played ice hockey in my youth and now still play a little tennis and golf. I do like to watch American football and, having lived in New Hampshire for twenty years now, I root for the New England Patriots. I was one of those people who went away from the Super Bowl game in the second quarter because I didn’t want to watch my team lose by a... Read more

Many people today are anxious about the state of the world. They find their global anxiety affecting their everyday lives. Here are some suggestions for dealing with that anxiety: Don’t participate fully in modern culture. You can be an active, concerned citizen of your nation and the world without giving yourself entirely to the values of modern life.  You can be eccentric, not fully part of the crowd. You could be part recluse or in other ways resist the enticements... Read more

I enjoy the life of a full-time writer. I crawl out of bed to my Mac, still in my pajamas, and write a few paragraphs that came to me in the dim twilight time between sleep and waking. I don’t have to answer to anyone, other than my agent and publisher, but I only hear from them at turning points in the publishing process. I also enjoy traveling to give workshops and lectures on the themes of my books, and... Read more

If I were writing a dystopian novel about America’s end time, I might well use a short punchy name for the arch villain or anti-hero, say “Trump.” Dickens might have done the same, given his penchant toward gnarly names like Sykes and Pip.  A few months ago I walked out of a hotel in Chicago and looked down the street at a glassy skyscaper dominating the scene and saw the word “Trump” spelled out like graffiti in overlarge letters midway... Read more

One of my choice guides in all the work I do, whether writing or practicing therapy, is Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), a fifteenth-century Italian astrologer, philosopher, translator, musician and priest who lived in what is now a suburb of Florence. He wasn’t all that different in style from a psychotherapist today.  He gave workshops at his villa at which painters and architects discussed ideas, stories and images of the Greeks and Romans. Botticelli, for example, was present and was inspired to... Read more

To a human, there is no such thing as the body, pure and simple, a thing to be treated objectively. It is always meaningful and expressive. Only the objectifying, measuring, quantifying philosophy of our time could entice us to see ourselves as things. Read more

Emerson writes: “Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.” Notice that given all his many images, none is a straight line of progress. Read more

They tell us that the gunmen and terrorists who shoot down numbers of innocent people are calm and methodical as they answer some urge in themselves to be barbaric and violent. Some assume that this calm is a sign of rationality and planning. But it is more likely an aspect of the insanity, the loss of human feeling for others, that produces a state of stupor. I began my book Care of the Soul with this thought: “The great malady... Read more