From the Blog

”Without gratitude, life can be lonely, depressing and impoverished. Gratitude enriches human life. It elevates, energizes, inspires and transforms, and those who practice it will experience significant improvements in several areas of life including relationships, academics, energy level and even dealing with tragedy and crisis.”

Using the will means helping yourself to want the good thing, to stick with your good resolutions and intentions easily, without white-knuckling. It’s a combination of virtue and good purposes.

In this episode – we go deep on mastering the superpower that underpins all other powers, how your brain’s automatic survival mechanism tilts you towards unhappiness, growing the mental resources to deal with the biggest challenges of your life

In a profound sense, we are what we remember – the slow accumulation of the registration of lived experience. That’s what we have “taken in” to become a part of ourselves. Just as food becomes woven into the body, memory becomes woven into the self.

Right Mindfulness is one of the three elements of the Path that focus particularly on your internal states of being (the others are Right Effort and Right Concentration).

With Insight, you understand the factors that shape your reactions. Your reactions are not fixed and inevitable. They are constructed within your mind – which is very hopeful, since it means you can send them in a better direction.

Many of the practices that support our well-being and happiness as adults are wonderful for children as well, but the way that they are taught must be developmentally appropriate and meet their sometimes very different needs.

How do we change? In this pioneering talk, Dr. Shauna Shapiro draws on modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom to demonstrate how mindfulness can help us make positive changes in our brains and our lives.

Why is skillful interaction with our angry emotions so necessary? It’s because anger is both one of the most effective social tools for achieving short range results, and one of the most toxic emotions to ourselves and our family/social networks.

Some exercises that will help show you where in your own brain the emotions of anxiety and security live.

In Western culture, we are taught that if suffering exists, something is wrong. It is a mistake. I had a boss years ago who, when something didn’t work out, demanded, “Whose fault is this? Who is to blame?” When I would explain that sometimes things just don’t go...

Use letting go whenever you relax, get stress relief, release painful feelings like worry or anger, take things less personally, or drop thoughts that make you and others unhappy.

For most people, the point of living boils down to one or more of these three things: Quality of life, Contribution and Learning. So if you have been wondering what you’re doing here on this earth, you might look to one or more of those categories!

Take charge of the biochemistry – in your own body – that is the physical basis of your well-being and your capacity for contemplative practice.

Awareness of the body has been a fundamental practice within most contemplative traditions. The body as a temple, the body as a source of beauty, the body as repulsive, the body as transitory—all of these concepts have had their place in spiritual practices.

Any mindfulness is a good thing. It’s one of the seven factors of enlightenment and the one that catalyzes the others – so the more mindfulness, the better.

The Buddha taught that complete enlightenment was possible for householders and monastics alike. It’s wonderful news that ordinary activities such as going to work, raising a family, driving in traffic, paying bills, raking the leaves, etc. are not inherent barriers to complete freedom, joy, love, and inner peace.

Wisdom (sometimes called “discernment”) is one of the ten “paramis” or perfections of a Bodhisattva, an Awakened person who postpones their ultimate enlightenment to bring all beings to liberation.

The Eightfold Path is the fourth of the Buddha’s Noble Truths, and he described it as the way that leads to the uprooting of the causes of suffering, and thus to increasingly stable and profound peacefulness, wisdom, virtue, and happiness.