One-half plus one-half does not equal one; one whole plus one whole equals relational wholeness.

The religions are the buildings or the institutions, the groups, but inside of that is what moves, is what's alive, is the beating heart of spirituality, and really, the heart's blood is the mystical experience. Not airy fairy vague mystical experience, but transformative, intimate experience that really touches your heart with love, and not just sex.

Like many others, I sometimes find that cooking can be naturally grounding.

Everyone has values, and values their family, values their health, their sanity, their safety and security, and their families, their parents, their children, their pets, their environments, well-being in general.

We each need to make peace with our own memories. We have all done things that make us flinch.

However, we need to participate and manage skillfully, helpfully, and harmoniously, for a better world, family and society to be possible. So everybody's spiritual by nature I believe, not that they necessarily have to be religious. Everybody wants, or cares about, and has values even if they don't talk about them all the time explicitly, like some noisy preachers do with their foghorn voices and dogmatic views.

Unlike some of my other dharma brothers who got names that were very long and obscure, and nobody could remember or pronounce, that they didn't like. They wanted to give their names back, but it wasn't like that, it wasn't transactional. He would name some people and say 'you're married', and then they were married, but you know it wasn't really transactional.