Childhood wounds are emotional or psychological imprints left on us during our formative years. This time period is often considered ages 0-8, however I believe our childhood years can refer to a much longer period extending into our adolescents, up to age 17 or 18. These acquired wounds, big or small, end up shaping our perceptions and influencing our adult lives. Childhood wounds can leave lasting imprints on an individual's emotional and psychological well-being. As a therapist, my role is to delve into the depths of these wounds, guiding my clients towards healing and growth. One powerful approach that I utilize is the transpersonal lens, which expands the therapeutic landscape beyond the individual and into the realms of spirituality and interconnectedness.

Childhood experiences shape the foundation of our emotional well-being, and for adult children of addicts, the wounds run deep. Growing up in an environment marked by addiction can have profound and lasting effects on one's mental and emotional health. As a psychotherapist, I have found that incorporating Buddhist psychology provides a unique and effective lens through which to help adult children of addicts navigate their healing journey.

What is your pattern of attention? Do you attend to your list of things that have to get done? Are you constantly scanning for what is wrong, or what will go wrong? Are you preoccupied with what others might think of you? Are you filled with doubt or self blame? Before you act, do you think "what’s in it for me?" How often to you pause and notice what you are consumed by? How often are you 'doing' as opposed to 'being?' How often do you attend to gratitude and your inner wellbeing?

Grappling with our inner critic; that voice that judges yourself and others is the topic at hand.

Of all the marvelous array of thoughts and obsessions that are possible, negative judgments about ourselves and others are the mind’s most prominent compulsive obsession. Negative and reactive judgments can arise instantaneously and in regard to almost anything. The mind’s ability to generate such judgments is very powerful, because it’s working off old neural programming. A lot of our repetitive judgmental themes are connected to earlier life events regarding others or often rooted in self-judgments or events that happened earlier in our life. This is why it is a good practice to investigate our judgments. It is a brave task as it inevitably will lead you to your own wounds, traumas, and memories of judgment being inflicted upon you. Not to mention that if you allow critical judgments to remain unexamined, they can come to occupy many of your thoughts and emotions, and even your dreams. Your judging mind blocks the energetic flow from your life, it is like an anchor that holds you down and does not allow your life to flourish and become abundant.

Intuition, the knowledge we find within. The awareness of the subtle stuff which lies outside our focused attention. It is our implicit communication with the world around us, the collective unconscious. The information that is derived from our ancestral memory and experiences. I have recently committed to fine tuning my intuition. So today that is what I will write about.

Constantly bombarded by the fast pace of life we do not take the space or time for contemplation. Information is at your fingertips, we are always “dialed in” and superficially connected to the digital world; there is always chaos and violence in the news, the pain and suffering seems right at our doorsteps and cannot be ignored. We are in a pressure cooker. Time, information, travel, and technology run at warp speed around us. And as our options multiply and become endless, so too do our fears, prejudices, defenses, addictions, and bad habits. Within this vortex of confusion and quickness we lose sight and sensation of our vitality. We seek self-worth outside of ourselves. So much of our modern world is designed to discover, understand, and improve the outer world, we have lost touch with the exploration of the inner world, mind/heart.

Should we be happy all of the time? 

Of course it feels good to be happy, but is that state achievable all of the time? With our modern lives of sometimes working two jobs to pay the bills, over consuming, waste, attachment to social media and our electronics, trying to get a work-out in, figuring out what to eat tonight so that we can go to sleep and do it all again tomorrow… Or even in our contemplative states, recognizing that our problems are so small compared to the hungry, poor, abandoned, and traumatized. How does one fit in happiness and strive for happiness?

I’ve been thinking about the experience of “flow.” We have all had these moments, when everything sync’s up just so, clicks right into place, locks and loads, and then you are vibrating with a frequency that feels so right and in tune with everything around you. This can be felt in what is frequently called a “runners high,” or riding a bike, reading a book, listening to a favorite song while driving on back roads with all the windows down, composing a piece of music, dancing, public speaking… there are endless experiences of flow. It’s like a peak performance when all the elements align and you are in ‘it.’ Everything feels so natural and energized.