Emotional Intelligence on the Spiritual Path: Feeling the Shadows

When Daniel Goleman published his highly acclaimed book Emotional Intelligence, he fundamentally redefined what it means to be smart. His argument was incredibly straightforward: true intelligence is far more than your IQ, your raw intellect, your memory, or your academic prowess. Emotional intelligence is the capacity to be aware of, control, and express one's emotions skillfully, honestly, and without unnecessary drama.

My own personal spiritual journey was never really defined by pure, academic intellect. Climbing the seven spiritual mountains makes you a different kind of smart; it makes you well-rounded smart.

I’m just a regular guy. Give me a river and a fishing pole and I’m existentially at peace, fully capable of experiencing and expressing my own quiet, inner joy. But to get to that peace, you have to discover the full, messy range of your emotional intelligence.

It begins, simply enough, by finally placing ...

How to Pay Attention to Your Thoughts Without Going Crazy

I hate to be the one to dash your hopes of becoming a brilliant, highly original thinker, but the thoughts currently bouncing around inside your head aren’t vastly different from the thoughts in the heads of the other eight billion people wandering our lonely little planet.

Even worse, ninety-nine percent of the thoughts you do have aren't even new. They are being replayed on an hourly, daily loop, like a bad disco song lingering in your brain days after you heard it at a tacky wedding.

You are way more than the random, looping thoughts in your head. In Michael A. Singer’s renowned book, The Untethered Soul, he drops an absolute hammer of truth right at the beginning: "There is nothing more important to true spiritual growth than realizing that you are not the voice of the mind–you are the one who hears it."

To actually realize this, we have to start paying close attention to the tracks playing on the mind's radio station. H...

How to Overcome Spiritual Distraction in a Digital World

Whenever I see someone texting or scrolling while driving, it makes my blood boil. It’s bad enough that they have absolutely zero capacity for self-control, but their lack of discipline puts everyone else in danger. Cruising down the highway at seventy miles an hour with your nose buried nonchalantly in a smartphone as you steer a two-ton rolling block of steel is just plain bad karma.

But this is just an extreme symptom of a universal disease.

If lying is the ego’s smokescreen and denial is its concrete bunker, distraction is its 24/7 carnival. If we don’t put our constant, ferocious appetite for distraction in check, there’s no way we’ll even come close to climbing the spiritual mountains. We simply won’t have the time, the energy, the focus, or the resolve.

To get your time and energy back, you need to see exactly how you are giving your attention away. There are basically two kinds of distraction you need to pay attention...

Circumstantial, Cultural, and Existential: The 3 Types of Denial

If lying is the ego’s smokescreen, denial is its concrete bunker.

Denial is the juvenile, fear-based solution to dealing with experiences, people, places, and things that don’t fit into our fictionalized reality. Anything we don’t wish to deal with, anything outside our belief system, and anything that may cause us discomfort, anxiety, or pain—we simply deny and conveniently pretend it does not exist.

Often, denial acts as a massive, heavy dam against stress, anxiety, depression, or fear. But if you remember, those uncomfortable feelings are the vital, urgent messages from your Pain Jewel. You can push those messages away, and you can push, and push, and push. But eventually, reality will break down your denial defenses and completely overtake you.

Denial can literally ruin your life. It completely stunts your capacity to pay attention, which means it will completely stall your spiritual journey.

To dismantle the bun...

How to Stop Lying to Yourself: The Ego's Favorite Smokescreen

Let’s circle back to a rather uncomfortable truth: Whether we’re conscious of it or not, we’re all chronic liars. We lie to strangers. We lie to our family and friends. And most dangerously, we lie to ourselves.

Lying is baked into the illusory, separate, ego-bound, dream-state personality. It’s the ego's ultimate preventative measure. It prevents us from paying complete attention to reality, because reality is the very thing our ego subconsciously fears the most. So, instead of facing what is actually happening, we gloss it over with a complicated, fabricated web of BS, allowing us to defer our fear indefinitely.

If you want to climb The Mountain of Attention and actually wake up, lying is like trying to hike with a blindfold on. When you lie, your critical thinking goes completely dull. You become incredibly susceptible to latching onto the next shiny belief system that comes along.

We can't conquer what we refuse to l...

Metaphysics vs. Consciousness: Which Spiritual Path is Right for You?

When you first wake up from the autopilot of daily life and realize there is more to existence than paying bills and scrolling on your phone, you are usually desperate for answers. You start reading the books, exploring altered states, and searching for proof that you are more than just a physical body.

Eventually, however, every sincere spiritual seeker hits a massive fork in the road. You are forced to choose between two entirely different ways of experiencing reality.

This is the great cosmic debate, and it is rarely talked about in the modern wellness world. It is the conflict between metaphysics and consciousness. If you don’t pay close attention to which path you are walking down, this dilemma can stall your spiritual progress for years.

Here is the grounded, no-nonsense breakdown of the two paths and how to know which one is right for you.

The Allure (and Trap) of Metaphysics

Metaphysics deals with the a...

What is the Hypnagogic State? (And How to Use It for Awakening)

When you start reading about spiritual awakenings, you inevitably run into wild stories of out-of-body experiences, astral projection, and altered states of consciousness. To the grounded, logical mind, this sounds like complete pseudo-science or mystical, new-age fluff.

But if you strip away the woo-woo jargon, you are left with something highly practical. Inducing an out-of-body experience isn't magic. It is a mechanical, neurological state. And you actually pass through the doorway to it every single night without even realizing it.

That doorway is called the hypnagogic state. Here is the grounded reality of what it is, what it feels like, and how you can use it to completely shatter your spiritual ignorance.

The Twilight Zone of the Mind

The hypnagogic state is the transitional, semiconscious, or "twilight" phase between wakefulness and sleep.

From a neurological perspective, this is the phase where your brain sh...

Finding Your Spiritual Proof Jewel: Why Belief Is No Longer Enough

Most spiritual seekers start their journey running on a very old, very exhausted fossil fuel: belief.

You may believe (fervently, fundamentally, vaguely) in a God, a Self, Jesus, Buddha, an afterlife, an eternal soul, reincarnation, spiritual awakening, enlightenment, or any number of religious concepts, but you don’t actually know if any of them are real.

Glance at the “solid ground” below your feet right now and you’ll see that it isn’t so solid after all. You are, contrary to your beliefs, knee deep in the dark, muddy swamp waters of spiritual ignorance. Most belief systems are constructed from inherited stories, cultural myths, age-old falsehoods or fanciful thinking.

If you attempt to climb the seven spiritual mountains fueled by belief, with a great amount of effort and a lot of luck, you might make it to a few mountain tops. But if your goal is true awakening, belief, faith, hope and any forms of wishful thin...

What is the Pain Jewel? Understanding Existential Depression

Deep down in the recesses of your being there is an existential pain that most are minimally, consciously aware of. I call this the Pain Jewel.

Read any cheap, mass-market self-help book on the shelf today and you’ll discover that human beings are motived by just two forces: pain and pleasure. We seek joy and peace, and we aggressively avoid stress and hurt. But Western culture has a very difficult time coming to terms with the existential fact that life is indeed suffering.

Whether we lie about it, deny it, stoically stifle it or distract ourselves to death from it, we are constantly trying to numb the Pain Jewel. But if you want to actually wake up and climb the seven spiritual mountains, you have to do the exact opposite. You have to listen to it.

The SOS Signal of the Soul

The first quality of the pain jewel is that it continually broadcasts an SOS signal. That signal emanates from the darkest, hidden-most, central c...

Self-Discovery: Waking Up from the Story of "You"

Our modern culture treats self-discovery like a treasure hunt. We are sold the idea that if we take enough personality tests, travel to the right exotic locations, or meticulously curate our hobbies, we will finally uncover the hidden gem of our "true identity."

We treat the self as an object that needs to be found, categorized, and polished.

But if we look at the actual mechanics of consciousness, this approach is fundamentally backward. True self-discovery is not a process of addition or acquisition. It is not about writing a better, more exciting story for your life. It is the profound realization that you are not the story at all.

Here is the grounded, no-nonsense truth about what it actually takes to discover who you are.

The Ghostwriter in Your Head

To understand self-discovery, you first have to look at how your current identity is constructed.

From a neuroscientific perspective, your brain relies heavily on the Default Mo...