pcousineau

Fr (French – Français) J’arrive d’un « road trip » avec ma conjointe à travers les États-Unis. C’était un rêve, probablement généré il y a de très nombreuses années par le visionnement du film « Easy Rider ». C’est d’une autre époque, celle de mon adolescence et du début de ma vie adulte. Pour un québécois élevé dans une […]

A winter dialogue about an apartment’s temperature in Montreal: Wife: “It’s cold in here.” Husband: “Temperature is just nice in here or (even) it’s too hot.” Then they argument about who is right and who is wrong – there should exist some objective criterion that would permit to clarify whose perception is distorted (“something is […]

“Human emotional responses are just echoes of our own history being brought into the present by the current context. If our reactions are rooted in our history and our reactions are our enemies, then our own history has become our enemy. There are no good technologies for removing a person’s history, at least not selectively.” […]

When the idea of this post came up to my mind, I smiled and said to myself that it may look strange to some that this story shows up after two posts on spirituality! But apart from the fact that my fears have been permanent residents of my pinball machine (see post #12 for the […]

In order to make sense to me, spirituality has to integrate (versus segregate or even negate) many levels of reality conceptualization. In my life, physics, biology, psychology, sociology, and anthropology have been the most significant ones. Thus, you can’t change or erase your emotions, feelings, thoughts, and biological needs from the sole power of your […]

I am daring to explore a subject that may easily triggers controversies, this subject being spirituality. I already explained how I lost what is called religious faith around 18-19 years old, and that for me it wasn’t good news. I tried to replace faith by philosophy, then by psychology; my life’s objective would become the […]

In “Meaning” and “Meaning 2”, I gave examples of personal meaning construction. But what is universal in that personal? The psychologist part of myself likes to have a conceptual system in which there are some general principles about meaning and motivation. When a theoretical system is used flexibly in therapy, it may offer an excellent […]

I am around 7 years old; my brother tells me that I am selfish. It follows a disappointment he experienced with me. Somebody gave me (or us? – too long ago to be certain) four pretzels’ sticks and I didn’t want to share them with him. It ended up in a skirmish and a deep […]

As I was preparing my participation to a workshop that will be given this week in Montréal by Robert A. Neimeyer, I read this in Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001 – 2013 for Kindle edition) “Any narrative, to be intelligible to its author or its audience, must draw on […]

I am in my mid-sixties, getting where for some illusions get harder and harder to construct (for others, to the contrary, it has become the time to do so). What is real, what is important? Byron Brown in the Editor’s Preface to Almaas’ book The Unfolding Now, writes: Our beliefs about what will allow us […]