Living with someone we love, with all the joys and challenges, is one of the best ways to grow spiritually. But real awakening only happens, says renowned psychologist John Welwood, in the charnel ground where we acknowledge and work with our wounds, fears, and illusions. As seen inside the September 2017 Lion's Roar magazine. While most people would like to have healthy, [...]
About John Welwood
The Perfect Love We Seek, The Imperfect Love We Live
Love is what we long to receive and to give, yet our intimate relationships are conflicted and often painful. Psychologist John Welwood looks at the difference between absolute and relative love, and the wound within each of us that no other can heal. Again and again it defeats me— This reliance on others for bliss. —from a poem by the author While most of us have [...]
The Practice of Love
For many of us, opening our hearts to ourselves may be the hardest part of the path. John Welwood on how and why meditation helped him do it — unconditionally. Freud once admitted in a letter to Jung that “psychoanalysis is essentially a cure through love.” Yet while many psychotherapists might privately agree that love has some kind of role in the healing process, the [...]
On Spiritual Authority
The false prophet and the genuine spiritual master both undermine the habitual patterns of self. Yet one does this in a way that creates bondage, while the other does it in a way that promotes liberation. What is this important difference? How does genuine spiritual authority operate? This is not a simple question. It is impossible to set up an ideal model for what a true [...]