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 ...
Anxiety Knows No Age Limits: Each moment is all we really ever have
We all get anxious from time to time. Even mild panic that’s morphed from mere anxiety is normal. Most often, though, ...
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 ...
How to Be Sad
There's a plethora of information about happiness. My literature search on this subject yielded over 13,000 scholarly ...
Suffering, Compassion, and a Skate Ramp
Last summer my neighbor’s son built a huge skate ramp right next to our property line. (We’re on different ...
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 ...
The Elusive Muse: Reclaiming creativity and focus
For three months, I’ve resisted writing. I sat at my desk or the kitchen table—my favorite place to write—to compose an ...
Facebook’s False Face: Comparing our insides to other people’s outsides
Guidelines for Kindness When Posting We seldom deliberately present a bad face on social media. Selfie stick in hand, ...
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 ...
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 ...
Procrastination: Scratching Items off the Mental To-Do List
A lot of our stress comes from holding our undone tasks in mind; the more we have, the more they weigh upon us. ...
The Present Moment and Transformation
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 ...
Finding Tranquility in Meditation Despite the Inevitable Storms
One of the stories from the life of Buddha that is depicted in numerous sculptures from many cultures is that of ...
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 Poet Seamus Heaney ...
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 ...
Finding Happiness: You Can’t Always Get What You Want
Those only are happy who have their minds fixed on some object other than their own happiness. – Mill Grasping ...
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
When your iPad or smartphone is having issues—unresponsive, randomly crashing, or just running sluggishly—it’s time to ...
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 ...
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, Blogging, 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 ...
