Take your practice deeper...
"Your view should be as vast as the sky, but your conduct as fine as barley flour." Padmasambhava
For those who have ventured beyond the strictures of traditional religions, the spiritual journey opens one's view to vast contradictions: For spiritual landscapes reveal not only the inconspicuous, but also that inner worlds are greater than any external world where one might sojourn.
Ideally, psychotherapy can be understood as an opportunity for shared witnessing and accelerated growth. Upon adopting a serious meditation practice, one understands how external life is not merely informed by outside events or altered by the force of our desires. Other influences, such as karma, wield an invisible, albeit potent, force that challenges us to accept our limitations, yet find the highest possible path beyond grief or amidst obstacles.
Yet when we are even slightly more awake to our inner world, our journey becomes more illuminated in general. Through self observation, we come to understand how what we have been blind to--for example what lies in our unconscious--also largely contributes to events. For the unconscious is not only the director of unseen causes but the source of that from which we project outward.
It is then and there, the boundary between the inner and outer world strangely seems more and more seamless. Each event then can be grasped as a learning opportunity, full of signs beyond the mayhem and suffering.
In such a book, our desires are transformed, transposed, and dissipate. More and more, we desire what others have overlooked or undervalued. And it is In just such a book, the book of our lives, others are ascertained anew: more deeply valued, more easily empathized with, and understood as expressing different aspects of one's self. For what once seemed separate no longer seems so, and we arrive at a place of greater authenticity, self-honesty, and openness, recognizing that are all one.