Bittersweet and Everything In Between
Being able to hold opposing emotions is one of the hallmarks of good mental health. Something can be both bitter and ...
Social Anxiety Disorder: (SAD) Looking at life from the outside
Nothing could be more fundamental than wanting to be liked. It is what leads us to seek and maintain relationships, and ...
The Benefits of Cultivating Forgiveness
It’s impossible to get through life emotionally unscathed. We’ve all been hurt at some time or another, and not just by ...
How Anxiety and Worry Affect Memory
Have you noticed that you forget things in times of particular stress? This is both common and normal. Cascading ...
Working with Emotions: How mindfulness and awareness help
Bringing the hidden to light is an important part of psychotherapy, sometimes achieved through focus on intellectual ...
Suffering, Compassion, and a Skate Ramp: How mindfulness and acceptance help
Last summer my neighbor’s son built a huge skate ramp right next to our property line. (We’re on different streets, so ...
Waking up on the Grumpy Side of the Bed: Coping with difficult moods
“Yesterday all day a small gardenia was a great consolation.” Thomas Merton A Year with Thomas Merton: Daily ...
Facebook’s False Face: Comparing our insides to other people’s outsides
We seldom deliberately present a bad face on social media. Selfie stick in hand, we depict ourselves smiling before an ...
Implacable Grandeur: Mindfulness and Change
If there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and ...
Accepting Life’s Turbulence: Fasten Your Seatbelt
This dramatic cumulonimbus was captured at 37,000 feet over the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Pilots know to avoid going ...
Learning to Notice What is Already There: The Rose Itself
Behavior therapists have long used a technique to distract clients from their difficult thoughts. The client wears a ...
Maintaining Composure as a Parent and Householder
Maintaining a graceful composure when performing life’s demanding household and child-raising chores can take a toll, ...
We Fear What We Cannot Control: Acknowledging Pain and Suffering
The German airplane crash by a suicidal pilot, the Florida shootings, the Boston bombings. Every week, we read about ...
Standing Behind the Waterfall: Learning to Change Distorted Thinking with Mindfulness
Thoughts are not facts. When we’re upset, our thoughts seem valid—yet it’s exactly when our emotions get stirred up that ...
Meditations on Humpback Whales: Mindfulness of Sights and Sounds
On a recent trip to Africa, I climb the bluff from which, I’d been told, I could see whales breaching. I have the strand ...
The Church of the Backyard: Finding Comfort in Nature
For many years I have met with a group of women one Friday morning a month. Around our kitchen tables, we light a ...
The New Year: Rebirth and obstacles
By the third or fourth week of January, many of us are reevaluating our lives. We’ve either made resolutions (and ...
The Present Moment and Transformation: Mindfulness and change
Research reported in the respected journal Science, in an article titled “Just think: The challenges of the disengaged ...
Happiness and Pleasure Born of Reverie and Reflection
When I was little and living in lush, sweaty Georgia, my mother would take me and my brother out to the lawn and we’d ...
How Wisdom Emerges from Body-Scan Meditation
Mindfulness Meditation: Using the Body Scan as a Focus Body-scan meditation focuses deliberate attention on ...
Finding Tranquility in Meditation Despite the Inevitable Storms
Buddha Sheltered by Muchalinda: Finding Tranquility in Meditation Despite the Inevitable Storms One of the stories from ...
How to Survive a Rip Current of the Mind When Practicing Mindfulness Meditation
Ruminations and Worry Make Meditation and CBT Difficult Recently during a visit to Hawaii, I read a pamphlet on ocean ...
A Lesson In Mindfulness: Blackberry Picking
Being mindful when doing daily tasks is a lesson in informal meditation practice. The Great Irish ...
Hamsa meditation
The Sanskrit word Hamsa translates as a swan. In yoga, the word breath is also known as Hamsa. One method of using the ...
Alternative & Complementary Treatment for Emotional and Physical Health
With changes in health care following the Affordable Care Act, providers will soon emphasize health promotion over ...
No Mud, No Lotus: Growing into our fullness
No Mud, No Lotus, Thich Nhat Hanh Many yoga practitioners are familiar with the lotus position, a classic meditation ...
Staying Grounded During Meditation–Earth Touching Mudra
In meditation, we notice thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations, and then return our focus to the breath. This ...
Finding Happiness: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Grasping for Happiness may Lead to Depression Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object ...
Being Playful Gives Freedom from the Restrictions we Put on Ourselves
Gerald Heard visited Georgia O’Keeffe at Ghost Ranch in 1937. He had an interest in Eastern religions and metaphysics. ...
How Mindfulness Can Reduce Stress
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction In 1979, Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn founded the Stress Reduction Clinic at the University ...
Powering off to reboot your internal drive
Irritability, Fatigue, Lack of Enthusiasm? Time to Power Off When your iPad or smartphone is having ...
The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness in Nature
The Benefits of Practicing Mindfulness in Nature Research has consistently shown that time spent in nature helps people ...
Freeing the Trapped Spirit Within
In Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, the spirit Ariel, living on a remote island, has been confined in a cloven ...
Mindfulness in Everyday Life: Letting Everything Become Your Teacher
Sometimes we can’t ignore external signals to be mindful. My puppy is a reminder. When I am absorbed in a task, usually ...
The fullest experience of the adventure of life: Eleanor Roosevelt, writing, and mindfulness
I just returned from Rhinebeck, NY, where I took an intensive professional training course in Mindfulness-Based ...
Appreciating the Absence of Pain
You don’t appreciate not having a toothache until you have a toothache. Sitting in the endodontist's chair last ...
