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The Power of Intention

  Every day, think as you wake up: Today I am fortunate to have woken up. I am alive, I have a precious human life. I am not going to waste it. ~The Dalai Lama To make the most of your life, to nourish the causes of happiness for yourself and others, it takes...

Questions About Self-Awareness

"How does being-awareness relate to our underlying animal nature?" "Is remorse a good thing?" "Is the “Self” real? What’s the nature of the sense of being that remains when parts of the psyche fall away?" These questions about self-awareness are just a sampling of...

How to Hardwire Your Brain for Happiness

We can outwit our brain’s negative circuitry and tilt ourselves toward the good in life. The inner strengths we all need to cope with life and enjoy it – strengths like resilience, positive emotions, confidence, and feeling loved – are based on underlying neural...

Creating Lasting Happiness in the New Year

The old-fashioned saying that “practice makes perfect” is true for one’s well-being and relationships. Picking just one thing to think about or do in your mind each day helps make the practice easier. Keep it simple. But stick with it. For example, drawing on a few...

12 Good Things

Keeping with tradition, each year I offer a list of  Twelve Good Things. I've paired each good thing with a fundamental inner strength: Learning, Mindfulness, Love, Resilience, Contentment, Integrity, Self-Worth, Courage, Social Intelligence, Motivation, Wisdom, and...

Neurodharma: A New Way of Healing

I was a speaker at the Meditative Praxis conference at the University of Hong Kong in August 2013, where I interviewed on "Neurodharma: A New Way of Healing". Here's the video:

Gratitude and the ‘Buddha Brain’

A "buddha brain" is one that knows how to be deeply happy, loving, and wise. We develop ourselves in this way by cultivating wholesome qualities and uprooting unwholesome ones. In a sense, we plant flowers and pull weeds in the garden of the mind - which means that we...

Simple Tips for a Stress-Free Holiday

The holidays are a time of year when our stress-levels tend to rise, despite our desire to enjoy the season and the people in our lives. So I’d like to offer you a few simple tips for taking care of your body, emotions, thoughts and actions, to minimize holiday stress...