worldview and perspective on Introspection

Prayer, therefore, is not introspection. It does not look inward but outward. Introspection easily can entangle us in the labyrinth of inward-looking analysis of our own ideas, feelings, and mental pr...

Entering the wilderness is a larger metaphor for dealing with our own demons, our own motivations, be they good or bad. In this short excerpt, Annie Dillard shares the value of entering the wilderness...

It would have been sad for me to spend my life just trying to superimpose stuff on people rather than trying to encourage them to look within themselves for what's of value.

A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what’s going on inside him- or herself, inside his or her consciousness, lest the act of leadership create more harm than good.

Know yourself and you will have a wholesome fear of God; know him and you will also love him.

People will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls.

It is a spiritual disaster for a man to rest content with his exterior identity, with his passport picture of himself. Is his life merely in his fingerprints?

Even desolation is a world to be explored.

In his devotional guide on preparing for the rite of confession in the Evangelical Lutheran Church, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard says that true repentance from the persp...

The practice of confession in the context of a liturgy or in a private ecclesiastical setting has declined drastically over the past fifty years, and in particular since the Protestant Reformation in ...

There is no way out of one’s inner life, so one had better get into it. On the inward and downward spiritual journey, the only way out is through.

To know oneself, is above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against the Truth, and not the other way around.

One helpful, practical tool to understand our blind spot is what’s called the Johari Window, an image developed as a counseling tool in the 1950s. Subjects were given a list of fifty-six adjectives, a...

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

The final mystery is oneself.

The pyschologist Carl Rogers, a person who would know quite well the interior lives of others, has this to say of our inmost thoughts: I have most invariably found that the very feeling which has see...

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these...

People can say one thing and do something totally different. You see the darkness that is often hidden from polite society. The thing that you see is a widespread insecurity. I think people put on a f...

I must register a certain impatience with the faddish equation, never suggested by me, of the term identity with the question, “Who am I?” This question nobody would ask himself except in a more or le...

But it is important to be aware that the act of judging others has its origins in our self-judgment. As I often tell patients, “Shamed people shame people.” Long before we are criticizing others, the ...

The insight that we can exercise some control over our thoughts and feelings is deep in Christianity.

A survey in 2015 found that 91 percent of adults in the United States agreed that the best way to find yourself is by looking within yourself. Everything else flows from this conviction. The thinking ...

In her book Invitation to Retreat , Ruth Haley Barton shares some of the many insights she has had since she began intentionally taking inattentional retreats to re-connect with God and her own d...

You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view... Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.

Immanuel Kant was one of the greatest philosophers in history. The story goes that he was accustomed to taking long summer walks. One day, he stopped in a park, sat on a bench for several hours, and j...

Psychologists have estimated that we have anywhere between twelve thousand and sixty thousand thoughts a day. The majority of those—as high as 80 percent—are thought to be negative: obsessing about mi...

When you are questioned about some all of your worldview, and you have... to take (your worldview] off and look at it in order to see what’s going on, you may not be able to examine it very closely be...

Scripture also speaks of “discernment of spirits” and encourages us to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” This aspect of discernment helps us to distinguish the real from the phony, ...

Presence is experienced as a unitary whole. Think, for example, about the experience of sitting on the top of a hill, far from the polluting lights of a city, gazing at a dark, starry sky. Unless you ...

In solitude we are in the presence of mere matter (even the sky, the stars, the moon, trees in blossom), things of less value (perhaps) than a human spirit. Its value lies in the greater possibility o...