Cerberus | Chapter 12: Cerberus Suffering
The role and function of my ego kept changing like a single story with many endings. My ego began as the rule maker, then became my guardian, and finally my prosecutor.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 11: Chew On This
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.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 10: Cerberus Speaks
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.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 9: St. Paul A.M.E.
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.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 8: The Glades
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.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 7: Cerberus at Church
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?
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 6: The Door
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.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 5: Loveable?
“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.”
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 4: Mom’s Cerberus
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.
Read moreCerberus | Chapter 3: Mr. C
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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