Keep Hope Not Fear Alive

by | Nov 30, 2010 | Blog

This recent series of posts has used the example of Stephen Colbert’s satirical “March to Keep Fear Alive” as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful – a major feature of the brain’s negativity bias that helped our...

Confronting the Negativity Bias

by | Oct 26, 2010 | Blog

My previous post used the example of Stephen Colbert’s satirical “March to Keep Fear Alive” as a timely illustration of a larger point: humans evolved to be fearful – since that helped keep our ancestors alive – so we are very vulnerable to being...

Balancing Joining and Separating

by | Aug 5, 2010 | Blog

There is a natural balance within us all between the desire for joining and the desire for separation, between the desire for closeness and the desire for distance. These two great themes – joining and separation – are central to human life. Almost everyone wants both...

21 Ways To Turn Ill Will to Good Will

by | Jul 19, 2010 | Blog

My recent posts have highlighted two very powerful, yet opposing forces in the human heart: in a traditional metaphor, we each have a wolf of love and a wolf of hate inside us, and it all depends on which one we feed every day. On the one hand, as the most social and...

How Did Humans Become Empathic?

by | Jul 5, 2010 | Blog

Empathy is unusual in the animal kingdom. So empathy must have had some major survival benefits for it to have evolved. What might those benefits have been? Empathy seems to have evolved in three major steps. First, among vertebrates, birds and mammals developed ways...

The Wolf of Hate

by | Jun 21, 2010 | Blog

I once heard a teaching story in which an elder, a grandmother, was asked how she had become so wise, so happy, and so respected. She answered: “In my heart, there are two wolves: a wolf of love and a wolf of hate. It all depends on which one I feed each day.” This...