by Ray Holland | Dec 29, 2024 | General
What I Learned from Talking Crows Drugs are a window but not a door. Ram Dass I assume you know psychedelics have been used in trauma research recently, which might seem a radical idea but in fact it’s a really old idea, the stuff of shamans. As a therapist,...
by Ray Holland | Dec 29, 2024 | General
The Prelude “Any glimpse into the life of an animal quickens our own and makes it so much the larger and better in every way.” John Muir [i] My first dog was named Lucky Merriweather. He was a liver-colored Springer Spaniel with scraggly hair that stuck like...
by Ray Holland | Dec 29, 2024 | General
Out of Restraints: Inspiration Inside-out and Upside-down Ray Holland Only after one hundred days of consistent work, only then is the light genuine, only then can one begin to work with the spirit fire. Lu Dongbin, The Secret of the Golden Flower. ...
by Ray Holland | Mar 14, 2024 | General
The crises on-the-ground related to substance abuse and AIDS was rapidly intensifying. Clients were frightened and dying in astounding numbers, getting incarcerated, treated as pariahs, selling off their possessions to get drugs, losing marriages and jobs. But that...
by Ray Holland | Mar 14, 2024 | General
Fast forward. Vermont far behind me, I became a supervisor in a drug and alcohol rehab program when crack cocaine and the AIDS epidemic were decimating communities of color in central Florida. As an undergraduate in Vermont, I had wanted to be a journalist, but the...
by Ray Holland | Mar 14, 2024 | General
If self-development and spiritual development are part of the same spectrum of consciousness and not simply antagonists then early damage to the former can cripple the emergence of the latter. Ken Wilbur, The Eye of Spirit Not long out of college, I happily returned...