Paul Dunion, EdD

“Don’t you ever think of others?” “Make sure you share!” “That’s you being selfish again.” These are just a few of the many appeals to giving that so many of us hear along the way. We are encouraged to be exemplary givers, with giving being elevated to heavenly status. The inevitable consequence is that the…

Allegedly, it is life at its best when we are succeeding and life at its worse when we are failing. How do we define success and failure? How do we come to have such a strong attachment to success and a deep aversion to failure? How does our relationship to success and failure define our…

Secular mysticism is the theme of my latest book, “Path of the Novice Mystic – Maintaining a Beginner’s Heart and Mind”. Unlike most spiritual traditions of Mysticism which are connected to a particular religion, Secular Mysticism is not oriented around religion. Secular Mysticism offers us an alternative to either believing we can triumph over life…

Many of us had custodial parents who attended to our basic physical needs for food, shelter and clothing.  However, many of us did not have psychological parents and it serves us to know what it means to have psychological parents. This is especially true when we consider that we typically parent ourselves the way we…

Triangulating happens when two people have a conversation about a third person where they represent the beliefs, feelings or behaviors of the third person.  There are typically several unfavorable outcomes. The first being that the 3rd person’s voice is stolen. That person does not have an opportunity to represent him or herself. The second consequence…

The bad news is that emotional intimacy is not natural. However, couples fall prey to thinking that if there’s enough love and enough kindness, then the depth of emotional connection is inevitable. What is natural is sliding into an enmeshed or fused relationship where one member is sacrificing his or her individuality, typically, in the…

We are encouraged to see times of loss, failure and longing as simply unfortunate. We might gain some wisdom regarding these times of challenge. Mythology is filled with examples of heroes and heroines losing their way, confused, frustrated and unable to compete some assigned task. Might we be able to gain some insight into living…

An old mentor of mine often spoke of “good love”. I came to understand that what he meant was love that was not smothered with sentiment unable to breathe life and vitality into the beloved. I’ve come to deeply appreciate my mentor’s considerations of love and have found it imperative to allow my own musing…

We have become a culture obsessed with diminishing stress or tension. Our sensitivity to being over stressed is likely a good thing, however, we may have lost sight of the value of tension, especially, the tension associated with human emotions. An ancient meaning of the word “sacred” is “to sacrifice”. We can ask: What do…

Valentines day is typically a chocolate worshiping time.  My hunch is that our confectionary cravings might be viewed as a deep hunger for the sweetness of life. I understand sweetness to be a tender arousal of heart which deepens our connection to ourselves,  to others, to nature or even possibility to the Sacred.  A couple…