By Dr. Marie Feuer It's morning horse poop time, my Zen exercise, and I've been thinking about two workshops I attended involving horses and leadership. Actually, thinking is a rather mild description of what's been going on. I've been wrestling with some questions that have tormented me for years, and the workshops brought them right up to the surface. When do we have the courage to say something difficult to another person, and when are we simply intruding into something th

By Dr. Marie Feuer Years ago, when I first met my teacher, there were people in the Los Angeles crowd who couldn't wait to become advanced. Advanced souls. Spiritually evolved. Whatever the next impressive thing was, they wanted to get there. My Teacher told us he suggested that we not be so ambitious. Then he said that his first human student to awaken had done so through becoming a quadriplegic. You could have heard a pin drop. Everybody was sitting there with some version

Feeling deeply, finding your balance, and letting go of the demand that life go your way By Dr. Marie Feuer · Life Path Healings Part One: You cannot skip the honesty Detachment is a subject I am endlessly fascinated with and also reluctant to talk about. The reluctance comes from watching what people do with spiritual ideas. They hear about forgiveness, serenity, letting go, or detachment, and they begin mocking up the behavior. “I forgave my father.” “I'm not emotionally at

Feeling deeply, finding your balance, and letting go of the demand that life go your way By Dr. Marie Feuer · Life Path Healings Part One: You cannot skip the honesty Detachment is a subject I am endlessly fascinated with and also reluctant to talk about. The reluctance comes from watching what people do with spiritual ideas. They hear about forgiveness, serenity, letting go, or detachment, and they begin mocking up the behavior. “I forgave my father.” “I'm not emotionally at

We can collect readings, diagnoses, programs, insights, and techniques while remaining strangers to ourselves. That may sound contradictory because surely learning more about ourselves should make us more connected to ourselves. Sometimes it does. But information can also become a substitute for attention. We identify a problem, find the right name for it, and then expect the name to take over the work of living with ourselves. Self-knowledge matters, but knowing something ab

When Helping Becomes Performance How communal narcissism turns service into a stage By Dr. Marie Feuer I recently heard someone describe communal narcissism with an example that stayed with me: spending ten thousand dollars on a gala to raise one thousand dollars for the charity. That hurt, because I have seen versions of it for decades, especially in spiritual and New Age communities. The setting is beautiful. The language is elevated. The people involved are praised for th

I have little dogs for the first time in my life, and occasionally a larger dog gets loose, jumps a fence, or comes after them. Once the immediate danger is under control, the first thing I do is check on my little dog. I pick them up or get close, make eye contact, and let them know, “I’ve got you. I’m here.” I do not pretend that nothing happened or demand that they stop shaking. I help them reconnect with me and feel safer before I deal with the other dog or its owner. One

Recently, someone asked my spiritual teacher whether we should be kind even to people who are unkind—or genuinely mean—to us. His answer was an immediate and absolute yes. I understood what he meant, but part of me still cringed. I spent years recovering from codependency, and for much of my life, being kind meant putting myself last. I gave away work, opportunities, possessions, time, attention, and enormous amounts of emotional energy. If somebody needed something, I gave i

You Are Never Feeling Nothing Learning to Recognize the Subtle Beginnings of Intuition A man I was working with once asked me about something that had happened during one of our meditations. I had asked him what he was feeling, and he had answered honestly that he did not feel anything. There was no recognizable emotion, no physical sensation he could name, and certainly no dramatic intuitive message. Then I asked whether he had felt bored for a moment—perhaps a small flicker

What The Telepathy Tapes makes possible—and what we must not overlook I am extraordinarily happy—and frankly a little stunned—by the conversations being opened through The Telepathy Tapes. Nonspeaking autistic children and young adults are describing telepathy, shared consciousness, communication through what some call “the Field,” and access to information they could not have acquired in conventional ways. Some describe learning languages, mathematics, or other material thro

I want to talk about something that is still extremely uncomfortable for me: passive-aggressive behavior. I’m not a clinical psychologist, so please don’t take anything I say here as a diagnosis. I’m an educator and teacher with a PhD in health psychology, and I have decades of personal and professional experience, but I am not a clinician. I want to keep that distinction very clear. What I’m talking about is a pattern of behavior I have encountered repeatedly—and one I am st

Why achievement can leave us empty—and why the process matters more than the prize I tried four times to record a podcast on a particular subject, and four times my phone crapped out somewhere in the middle. I was furious. Eventually I thought, apparently I am not meant to talk about that subject today—which made me even more furious, because I was attached to the outcome. I had decided what the podcast was going to be about, and reality kept saying, “No, you’re not.” That br

People just love entities. They are so much more fascinating than looking at the possibility that you might be selfish—or cruel. Yes, entities are real. There are many different kinds, and yes, they can cause very real problems. But I am less interested in creating another dramatic story about dark forces and much more interested in how and why an entity was able to attach to someone in the first place. That is where the real work begins. You may be reading this because some

In my time among muggles, I spent decades hiding my “other life”—my life as a spiritual being. I remember being terrified as a child that my mother, who was a therapist, might put me in a “funny farm.” I made my big brother promise he would never let that happen. Poor guy. He was worried about me too. I was always strange: a full-blown flower child who thought the world existed so that people could share with and support one another. For decades, I was somehow able to live th

People go to therapy to learn about themselves, investigate their problems and challenges, and develop skills that may improve their emotional and mental health. People seek spiritual practices for many of the same reasons, often adding the desire to discover greater meaning in their lives. We want to understand why we feel the way we do, why certain patterns keep repeating, why we cannot seem to obtain what we want or need, and why our bodies, relationships, finances, or car

I want to talk about what I think is one of the biggest obstacles to healing and growth. The term is radical acceptance, although it means different things depending on who is using it. This is my understanding of it. Radical acceptance means not only being honest, but being able to be honest with yourself without bells and whistles and without spiritual bypassing. In other words, I’m not going to say, “I have a terrible temper, but it’s because it’s in my chart,” or, “That’s

Victims and True Feelings What is the difference between being a victim and feeling like a victim? One is identifying as a victim and making decisions from that base as a way of life. The other is going into the wounds of whatever happened to you where you were a victim, feeling those feelings, exploring them, processing them and allowing them to be released, taken from you all as a part of the journey of healing. What healing looks like: Waking Up, coming out of denial. You

Schools mainly teach you to memorize and comply. Education is built for efficiency these days. Move them in, move them out, no child left behind forces teachers to comply to keep their jobs and meet quotas because school scores and attendance need to be kept up in order to fulfill accreditation and continue to receive funding. It is no one person’s fault. The education system is severely outdated and needs a complete overhaul. Furthermore busy parents with no real education

Hidden Survival Strategies of Covert Narcissism: Understanding Covert Control, Shame, and Relational Patterns When people hear the word narcissism, they often imagine loud, boastful, attention-seeking behavior. But not all self-protective or controlling behaviors look that way. Some are quiet, subtle, and socially acceptable—so much so that they often go unnoticed, even by the people using them. This article is not about diagnosing personality disorders. It’s about understand

Impression management, in balance, is a healthy part of life. At work, you manage your presentation to be a “good” co-worker. In balance, this simply means you are making an effort to fit into the culture of your workplace, to be social, and to be socially appropriate. At family get-togethers, and in all kinds of social gatherings, people use impression management to fit in, to keep the peace, or even to make a statement. Like all behaviors, when impression management is used