Cerberus | Chapter 11: Chew On This

October 22, 2019

For most of my life I could not tell the difference between my thoughts, emotions, and sensations for one basic reason: my ego refused to help me out. The details of my experiences and discovery follow but with a traveler’s advisory note. Proceed with caution.

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Cerberus | Chapter 10: Cerberus Speaks

October 13, 2019

I had spent years studying Western philosophers who described what happened when they turned their attention in on itself. Now I had to become the active agent rather than the passive reader. So I created my own exercise.

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Cerberus | Chapter 9: St. Paul A.M.E.

October 6, 2019

Thanks to these ongoing experiences in this church, I found what I didn’t know I was looking for until it showed up inside me, namely, an inner sense of being an adored and deeply communal self.

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Cerberus | Chapter 8: The Glades

September 28, 2019

I easily identified Pastor Hughes’ elegantly simple formula for creating feel-good emotions in us. He had stoked and then quelled our anxiety in the name of God.

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Cerberus | Chapter 7: Cerberus at Church

September 21, 2019

Had I trained my students to cut out feelings until the heart went numb? Were my faculty colleagues doing the same thing to their students? Were we manufacturing ministers who created corpse cold Sunday services?

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Cerberus | Chapter 6: The Door

September 14, 2019

I had spent most of my life learning how to avoid feelings of empathy, compassion, and caring because they were neglected or attacked. Then I cried for six months.

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Cerberus | Chapter 5: Loveable?

September 7, 2019

“I was born in New Jersey,” I said. “I am American, and so are my parents. But I have always known that `Sue’ is not my real name. See that tree over there? We could refer to that tree as `Sue’ if we wanted to. But that’s not its real name.”

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Cerberus | Chapter 4: Mom’s Cerberus

August 30, 2019

I seemed to have found a door, opened it, and entered into a part of herself never before disclosed to me. I had entered the place where she spent most of her life: the room guarded by the sculptured, mourning bodies she carved to block the dark entranceway to her heart. 

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Cerberus | Chapter 3: Mr. C

August 23, 2019

Within a very short time, I was booking hundreds of Hollywood celebrities and celebrity intelligentsia for my show because of the way I set it up: as a glimpse into their emotional heart.

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Cerberus | Chapter 2: The High Priest of Anxiety

August 16, 2019

I spent most of my free time holed up in Dad’s booklined study. This dense space is where I first met the pagan beast. I felt free as a monk in his cell after the day’s duties were completed. The dark matter of the universe was now as close to the monk as his thoughts.

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