Cliff Heegel Ph.D.

Most of us are asleep at the wheel, living in our private subjective Dreamland. Dreamland is where suffering can happen. Good dreams, bad dreams, no matter– It is all just dreams, just thoughts, feelings, and images in our mind. Mind movies, mind stories. In Dreamland, life is a matter of luck. Good luck? We feel [...]

Mindfulness is essential for living the best life we can live. Mindfulness is the energy of being aware and awake to our present moment. It is the practice of deeply touching the moments of our everyday lives. To be mindful is to be awake, present and at one with those around you and with what [...]

For some reason the past couple of weeks I have been spending a lot of time on values work. I thought I should post this to make it easy to find.Values answer questions about your ideals like:

What sort of qualities do you want to cultivate as a person?
What do you want your life to stand for?
How do you want to be in your relationships with friends?
What role do you want to play in your community? In your culture?
Deep down inside, what is important to you?

In this essay I outline ways to change personal behavior patterns. But first, some words from a former President of the United States: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” — Abraham Lincoln. So before we start chopping, let’s sharpen the ax. When [...]

In brief: Something to look at here is the idea of shadow judgments. It is just another way to describe the function of the ‘selves’. Selves we like or think others will treat right we will identify with and accept as “Me”. And the shadow selves, the aspects of Me that we judge as inferior, shameful, or whatever they trained us to think, we will disown the shadow selves and not see even them as Me. This results in cognitive fusion with one of the opposite selves (for example, good boy/bad boy) which results in us being trapped reacting to the stories about our selves that are in our head that we are emotionally and cognitively fused with.