D. Patrick Miller

Holding Our Power

An Interview With Malidoma Patrice Somé

The indigenous world is not interested in the show of power. It is interested in respecting the source of the power. This respect is kept alive by camouflage; the power is protected by hiding it. An elder who has the power to create a light hole — a gateway you can jump through into another galaxy — is not interested in using that power to impress people. He would not use that power to show off.

The Voice Of The Earth

A Conversation With Theodore Roszak

One of the paradoxes of our conception of progress is that, as time goes on, our society produces people more ecologically illiterate than people ever have been in the past. Widespread ecological illiteracy is one of the roots of our environmental crisis. Many people simply do not understand the biological foundations of their own survival.

A Brutal Sadness

Capital Punishment And The Politics Of Vengeance

Robert Alton Harris was gassed to death at sunrise on April 21, 1992, the first person to be executed by the state of California in twenty-five years. The execution ended fourteen years of legal wrangling over Harris’s fate, capped by four overnight stays of execution.

Lullaby

Replacing Therapy

A Conversation Between D. Patrick Miller And Tom Rusk

When a person agrees to accept this value system — which means pursuing respect, understanding, caring, and fairness within oneself, while also requiring them from others — I can use that agreement to great effect.

Mastering The Enemy Within

An Interview With Richard Strozzi-Heckler

My idea of a new warrior is one who takes on the challenge of facing his or her own aggression — mentally, physically, emotionally. The point is not to say that aggression is bad, but to recognize that it is within us, and to learn how to look at it and train it.

What The Shadow Knows

An Interview With John Sanford

The Jungian definition of the shadow was put well by Edward C. Whitmont, a New York analyst, who said that the shadow is “everything that has been rejected during the development of the personality because it did not fit into the ego ideal.” If you were raised a Christian with the ego ideal of being loving, morally upright, kind, and generous, then you’d have to repress any qualities you found in yourself that were antithetical to the ideal: anger, selfishness, crazy sexual fantasies, and so on. All these qualities that you split off would become the secondary personality called the shadow. And if that secondary personality became sufficiently isolated, you would become what’s known as a multiple personality.

The Way To Partnership

An Interview With Riane Eisler

In business, there’s an increasing emphasis on teamwork and a new vision of leadership — leadership that elicits creativity and productivity rather than controlling. And in the restructuring of the family, we’re beginning to see clearly the shift toward partnership.

Notes Toward A Journalism Of Consciousness

I was slowly beginning to question the whole purpose of identifying and eliminating “bad guys” from positions of power or influence, a purpose which seemed to be the end-all of investigative journalism. I wanted to know what made guys bad, and journalism seemed to have no means for investigating that.

Homeless

It is terrifying to look in the mirror and realize that our identification with the form we see is the first and grandest error of our lives. Paradoxically, it is the error we cannot completely undo as long as we are here. Hating that error can be as painful and unproductive as never perceiving it.