diane meriwether

Spiritual Bypass & Spiritual Materalism

Spiritual Bypass & Spiritual Materalism

There are two spiritual games I play, rackets as Alan Watts might say, as meaningless and diverting as solitaire on my phone. One is spiritual bypass, and the other is spiritual materialism. They are related. Spiritual bypass is the hope that I can transcend the painful grit of my life by rising above it spiritually. Maybe I won't have to feel my chest and groin torn apart when my lover betrays me, maybe I can just forgive everyone involved - as a saint might do. As it

A story from my life

A story from my life

I'd like to write about an unassuming jewelry box filled with gravel and tiny bones. I left California for Montana a week after my tenth birthday. Just before my birthday, my mother had given me a little beige jewelry box identical to this one: In the week before I Ieft, I filled the box with the treasures I had so far: the green metallic shell of a dead japanese beetle, a nearly complete mouse skeleton from the field near my school and a tiny silver heart on a chain that I

Working through disgust

Working through disgust

In the early 90s I met a bodyworker who persuaded me to get a massage. Because of my childhood, I experienced non-sexual touch as painful and I found bodies vaguely disturbing ("oogy" was the word I used) but I let her work on me anyway. Two months later I was handing Kleenix to a therapist. Six months after that I was in freefall. Everything I had so carefully put together - my marriage, my job, my home, even my identity was tumbling away. Against this spinning backd

Evil is suffering passed to someone else

Evil is suffering passed to someone else

When I was two, my mother broke my arm because I couldn't stop crying. Part One -- suffering in My mother had dreamed of having children, but she struggled with rage. Looking back now, I know she was horrified and ashamed by what she had done. To my mother, evil was something that made her feel bad, after my broken arm that something was me. It eased her discomfort to believe that she was only responding to my true nature. She was a victim, if you will, of her child's

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