suffering

Be gentle with yourself. It was a ‘message’ I received a few years ago during an attempted meditation that was going something like this: “Why do you always screw up your relationships? What is wrong with you? Here we go again, idiot!” You get…

Live long enough and at some point all of us will find ourselves close to someone in profound pain. We’re not talking garden-variety suffering here. We’re talking about serious addiction, self-mutilation, suicidal despondency. Almost always we are talking about the end-point culmination of years…

The 4 a.m. anxiety wake-up call. Shit, not again. The mental engine sparks to life and like that the mind is a whirl of anxious thoughts and fears about this person or that, regrets about the past, apprehension about the future, money, kids, health.…

A lot of people go for a walk or run to decompress, to blow off steam, to regroup. I’ve been doing that of late as well, but with a twist: Instead of spending the time looking at that which stresses me, I’m redirecting the…

Several years ago, at the absolute depths of my personal crisis, a horrendous and hideous thought suddenly occurred to me: What if there is no God? What if this entire existence is … meaningless? What if all of the suffering and anguish and turmoil…

In a classic scene from “Young Frankenstein,” Igor is dispatched to snatch from a laboratory the brain of a recently deceased genius as the final ingredient in Dr. Frankenstein’s reanimation project. Brought to life, however, the monster behaves in a deranged fashion, prompting Frankenstein…