Every year around this time I find myself doing a version of the same thing. Someone, either, a student, a friend, a person at a dinner party who has heard I lecture on Celtic rituals, asks me about Halloween, and I have to decide how far back I want to go before the question becomes a different, one that is entirely more interesting.

Every October I notice the same thing happening in my workshops. The dreams get stranger. Not more frightening exactly, though that happens too, but more crowded. More populated. People start arriving at my regualr Tuesday morning workshops with the particular look I have come to associate with what I call visitation dreams,

I want to be honest about something from the outset. I don't believe that lighting a pink candle, writing a name on a piece of paper, and placing a rose quartz crystal on your windowsill etc., will cause another human being to find you more attractive due to some mechanism of direct metaphysical causation.

Among the religious traditions I have encountered in thirty years of teaching and research in comparative religion, Yazidism is the one I find myself most consistently having to defend against the most persistent and the most consequential misrepresentation in the scholarly record.

want to start with the way Venus retrograde is often talked about in popular astrology, because I think much of the anxiety surrounding these periods comes from how they are presented. The internet isn't particularly good at complexity or nuance, and retrogrades tend to get reduced to a list of warnings.

There is a particular moment that happens every October, somewhere between the equinox and Halloween, when I stop and feel it, "the shift". It is not dramatic. It does not announce itself. One morning you walk outside and the quality of the air is different, the light lands at a different angle on the rooftops, and something in the body says: now.

There is a scene in the Talmud that I return to more often than almost anything else in all the relational literature I have spent my career reading. Two scholars are discussing the obligations of the Sabbath, and one of them makes the observation that the blessing said over the wine, the Kiddush, is not primarily about the wine at all. The wine is not the point.

I want to begin with something I observed in a monastery in Bhutan in my early thirties, because it has taken me the better part of two decades to understand what I was actually seeing.

I learned what a harvest actually was on a kibbutz in the Jezreel Valley in my mid-twenties. Before that, I had learned about it, from texts, from the Torah portions I had studied in my rabbinic training, from the Mishnaic tractates on agricultural law that I had worked through with a thoroughness that I was proud of and that had turned out to be, in the most instructive way possible, completely insufficient.

There is a particular quality of light in New England in late September that I find genuinely difficult to account for by purely meteorological means. I have lectured in a great many places e.g., Edinburgh, Lyon, Chicago, and now Boston, where I have lived long enough to feel the rhythms of this landscape in my bones, and I have never encountered anything quite like the light of a New England autumn afternoon.

Whenever I introduce my anthropology students to the mythology of northern Europe, I like to begin with a fairly simple observation, which is, people tell stories about the landscapes they actually inhabit. Desert cultures naturally develop stories shaped by heat, wind and enormous horizons.

One of the questions I'm asked surprisingly often, both by individual clients and during workshops, is a very simple one: "Why do I keep dreaming that I'm falling?" Whenever I mention falling dreams to a group, there are usually a few immediate smiles of recognition.

When I tell clients that I sometimes incorporate ancient Greek mysticism into relationship counselling, I’ve occasionally gotten a skeptical eyebrow raise. You know the one I’m thinking of. They envision smoke curling up from temple altars or cryptic sentences that are concealed by metaphor,

There is something about living on the New England coast that naturally inclines a person toward deep contemplation. This maybe due to the rhythm of the tides, the changing seasons, or the way the Atlantic has connected this corner of America with Europe for so long.

Living on the West Coast has given me the deep privilege of learning from countless Indigenous teachers over the years. My work has taken me to remote Indigenous communities across Canada, the United States, Central America, Australia, and South America.

People come to my Kabbalah groups with all kinds of prior exposure to numerology. Some have calculated their life path numbers, some have read about the Pythagorean system, some are devotees of the Chaldean tradition, and a few have had their numerological charts done professionally and arrived curious about whether there is any relationship between what they found there and what I teach.

She appears at the edge of the stream, usually at dusk or before dawn, washing clothes that are stained with blood. She is small, sometimes described as wizened and ancient, sometimes as a young woman with red, sometimes webbed feet. If you can get behind her and catch her before she sees you, you can compel her to answer three questions and grant you three wishes.

It is important to note that Jung never wrote systematically about tarot. This is worth acknowledging at the outset, because the relationship between Jungian psychology and tarot is sometimes presented as more direct and more authorised than it actually is/was.

My wife and I have a running joke that living in Greenwich Village means you can walk to a Kabbalistic study group, a drag show, and a five-hundred-year-old printing of the Zohar within the same afternoon, and none of these things are as far apart as they first appear.

I run dream workshops along the West Coast of the US, usually in someone's living room or a rented studio space with too many plants and not enough chairs, and there is one question that comes up in virtually every session I've ever facilitated. It comes up tentatively, often accompanied by a small embarrassed laugh, as though the person asking it suspects they are about to reveal something strange about themselves. Why, they want to know, do I keep having the same dream?

I want to begin with the word itself, because the word is doing rather a lot of work that most people who encounter this card never stop to examine. Hierophant. It comes from the Greek hierophantēs, hieros, sacred, and phainein, to show or reveal.

I teach meditation across a lot of traditions, I have certificates in mindfulness-based stress reduction, I trained for three years with a Tibetan Buddhist teacher in Santa Cruz, and I spent a semester sitting with a Zen community in the hills above Berkeley that remains one of the most formative experiences of my adult life. So when I encountered Hitbodedut, the Jewish contemplative practice of spontaneous spoken prayer and radical self-disclosure before the divine, I thought I knew what I was dealing with.

I moved from Boston to Maine several years ago, and there is a particular quality of August morning up here, the light already carrying the first hint of something cooler underneath the summer warmth, the angle of it changed just enough from July to notice, that always sends me back to Chinatown. To Harrison Avenue on a Sunday.

The word idol carries a weight of condemnation it has never entirely deserved. In its Greek original, eidolon, it simply means image or form. But somewhere in the long collision between monotheism and the religious practices it displaced, idol became a term of contempt

There is an uncomfortable scholarly truth at the heart of the Babushka legend that I feel obligated to address before we go any further, because I think it actually makes the story more interesting rather than less.

Scotland is one of those places I keep returning to in my research, not just because the landscape itself seems to demand a certain quality of attention, though it does, and anyone who has stood on the Orkney mainland at dawn and looked at the Ring of Brodgar rising from the mist knows exactly what I'm talking about, but because Scottish ritual practice sits at one of the most fascinating intersections I've encountered in thirty plus years of comparative work I've engaged in.

Of all the questions I get asked, and after years of working with dreams, I get asked a lot of them, the one that comes up most consistently, most urgently, and with the most visible mixture of embarrassment and genuine bewilderment, is this one, "Why am I dreaming about my ex?" We broke up years ago.

Every morning when I walk from my apartment to the synagogue, down through the Village, past the coffee shops just opening and the last of the night people still heading home, I think about the Garden of Eden. Not as a place. As a condition.

My first serious encounter with runes was in a graduate seminar on symbolic systems in pre-literate cultures, somewhere in the mid-nineties, in a classroom that smelled of old carpet and someone's lunch.

After twenty years sitting with people in my counselling practice, couples who can't stop fighting, individuals who can't stop choosing the wrong partners, people who love each other deeply and have somehow still managed to make a complete mess of things etc., I have become quietly convinced that the most useful relationship advice is very old.

I've been sitting with this topic for a while, the way I sit with most things that feel important, a little cross-legged on my back porch with tea going cold beside me and the the morning fog still sitting over the bay. Gender and sexuality.

There is a long tradition, considerably longer than the sceptical tradition I was trained in, that holds the opposite view with remarkable consistency across cultures and centuries. The Pythagoreans, and yes, we mean Pythagoras himself, the same man whose theorem you learned at school, working in southern Italy in the sixth century BCE, believed that numbers were not merely useful abstractions but the actual substance of reality.

I should say upfront that I came to this subject sideways, the way academics usually come to anything that matters. My formal training is in cognitive psychology and continental philosophy, and for the first fifteen years of my career I would have been politely dismissive of anything involving the phrase "third eye."

When I was in my twenties, long before I settled on the West Coast, I spent several years travelling through North Africa, Turkey, and parts of the Middle East. During that time, I had the privilege of sitting with Islamic scholars, teachers, and students who generously shared not only their knowledge but also their hospitality.

Over the years, my travels have taken me through Eastern Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, the Middle East, and across much of Western Europe. Along the way I became fascinated not simply by different religions, but by the symbolic languages people use to understand themselves.

When students ask me why tarot has endured for centuries despite enormous cultural and technological change, I often suggest that they begin by setting aside the idea that tarot exists primarily to predict the future.

Living in a small town on the coast of Maine has taught me that the changing seasons are more than entries on a calendar. Here, winter announces itself with quiet determination, spring arrives almost shyly, summer fills the forests with birdsong, and autumn transforms the landscape into brilliant shades of crimson and gold.

If there's one thing living in New York has taught me, it's that fear wears many different faces. Sometimes it's loud and obvious, the anxiety of losing a job, worrying about someone you love, or facing an unexpected diagnosis. Other times it's much quieter.

Living on the West Coast, I've had the opportunity to meet people from an extraordinary variety of spiritual backgrounds. Some attend churches, others meditate in Zen centres, some practice yoga, and others identify as Pagan or Wiccan.

When students first encounter Zoroastrianism, they are often surprised to learn that it is one of the world's oldest continuously practised religions. Founded in ancient Persia, probably sometime between 1500 BCE and 1000 BCE—although scholars continue to debate the precise dates—it has profoundly influenced the development of later religious traditions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

One of the questions I'm asked quite often in my work as a spiritual counsellor is whether dreams are "just dreams" or whether they can actually tell us something about ourselves. I've never thought the two possibilities have to be completely separate.

Astrology can be understood at many different levels. One important concept to recognise early on is that not every planet moves at the same pace. Some planets move quickly, and their influence may be felt over the course of days and weeks. These planets are said to be fast moving.

One of the things I've noticed after years of writing and talking about relationships is that couples rarely lose intimacy in one dramatic moment. More often, it gets worn away around the edges. Work runs late. Someone checks their phone during dinner. Conversations become increasingly concerned with groceries, children, bills and who remembered to put the washing on.

One of the things I've learned over the years is that spirituality doesn't always arrive wearing a name tag. Sometimes it shows up in the quiet moments when you're watching the sun set over the Pacific, sitting beneath an old redwood tree, or listening to the waves remind you that life moves in rhythms much older than we are.

Among the ancient cultures of Europe, few possess a legacy as rich in symbolism and ritual as the Celtic peoples. Stretching across Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall, Brittany, and parts of continental Europe, the Celts developed traditions that reflected a profound relationship with nature, the seasons, community, and the unseen world.

Living on the West Coast has given me countless opportunities to spend time in landscapes that seem to encourage a different pace of thought. I've walked through forests where the trees seem impossibly old, watched the light change across the desert, and stood beside the Pacific early in the morning when there was hardly another person around.

Fear has always interested me because it can be both incredibly intelligent and remarkably deceptive. We need fear. It tells us when something is wrong, warns us about danger and, at its most basic level, helps keep us alive. But anyone who has spent a sleepless night worrying about something that hasn't happened knows that fear doesn't restrict itself to genuine threats.

One of the reasons I continue returning to meditation after all these years is that it doesn't simply help me feel calmer, it helps me think more clearly. Living on the West Coast, where mindfulness classes, hiking trails, yoga studios, and meditation retreats are woven into everyday life, I've met people from every imaginable background who have discovered something similar.

Living on the North-Eastern coast of America, I have always found that the changing seasons encourage reflection. The brilliance of autumn gives way to the quiet stillness of winter, followed by the hopeful renewal of spring and the energy of summer.

Whenever I write about Native American spirituality, I think it's important to begin with something that should be obvious but is surprisingly often forgotten: there is no single Native American religion. Hundreds of distinct Indigenous Nations developed across North America, each with its own history, language, ceremonies, sacred stories and understanding of the world.