I have just turned 54 and guess am experiencing a midlife crisis.  I am retired, my health is very good, my marriage is great, as are my other relationships, etc…To many it seems I have a pretty perfect life and I really can’t argue with that perception.  My question then is why all of a sudden do I have such an overwhelming fear of death, of time running by too fast, too quickly?  I become overly anxious whenever I stop and think that my husband is 62 and our time together is suddenly limited.  Even as I write this I feel my heart racing just at these thoughts.  I always thought I had a pretty deep faith in God (I am a Reform Jew) but all of a sudden….?  (I am meeting with my Rabbi to talk about this but have great respect for your work on insight as well.)  Is it just me?  Is there something else I can do to get on and enjoy life?  Thank you so much!

I am a woman in my forties. I have for many years done a lot of spiritual work. Recently I came into conflict with a person that I thought I loved, and I screamed and raged, something I have done much in my life and when in the moment I seem powerless over. It feels like momentary insanity. A friend gave me a CD where I got to hear about mastering you inner dialog and it shocked me to realize the part where you speak about self-pity and how it is the root of all anger and jealousy. I am that person, I pity myself and think I deserve better and so forth. So I got an insight and I am very grateful for that. Now my question: How do I learn to see through this self-pity in the moment? How do I learn to control my impulses? I have hurt many people with my behavior and also myself. My life is not the one I want, because I have lived my life in this denial of self-pity, and I see it no longer works, but how to change it?
I thought I was spiritual that I had gained some sort of insight over the years. This discovery somehow laid me bare and very empty, as if I have to start all over again. Please help me to understand.

I realize that in my quest to be “open” I have lacked necessary personal boundaries.  As I begin to see the necessity for certain boundaries it feels like a deep belief that I have in “openness” as a value is at the risk of being lost. It troubles me.  It feels like the loss of a treasure.  Can I compare it to a loss of innocence? Can you speak to the value of each, openness and having boundaries, to the conflict of the two, or to whatever else you hear me saying? 

I have the CD Akasha – Yoga Spirit and one of the pieces is called Om Purnamada….I have looked online to try and decipher the meaning…can you help.

It seems like accepting paradox is the key to enlightenment and to our own peace of mind.  It seems that we are both a loving God/Oneness and individual “souls”.  And it seems that God is the same: someone we can pray to as well as being our own ultimate identity.  When Buddhists speak of “emptiness”, is this what they are alluding to?  Are we both individual souls and also NOT individual souls because our ultimate identity is God who is being us?