Acknowledging other people’s basic humanity is a remarkably effective way of shooing away the swarm of self-referential thoughts that buzz like gnats around our heads.
People would always ask whether we were believers, but when we said no, there were never gasps or glares. They may have thought we were going to hell, but they were perfectly nice about it.
Seeing a problem clearly does not prevent you from taking action, he explained. Acceptance is not passivity. Sometimes we are justifiably displeased. What mindfulness does is create some space in your...
We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these if only thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness. Joseph
We live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation, he wrote. We wax nostalgic for prior events during which we were doubtless ruminating or projecting. We cast forward to future events during...
The Way of the Worrier 1. Don’t Be a Jerk 2. (And/But . . .) When Necessary, Hide the Zen 3. Meditate 4. The Price of Security Is Insecurity—Until It’s Not Useful 5. Equanimity Is Not the Enemy of Cre...
Overall, compassionate people tended to be healthier, happier, more popular, and more successful at work. Most
What he really meant was something like, Everything in the world is ultimately unsatisfying and unreliable because it won’t last.
The habits of a lifetime reassert themselves with astonishing speed.
While I may not have been physically addicted, I was certainly psychologically hooked. I missed getting high so badly that it was the first thing I thought about in the morning and the last thing I fa...
In moments where I was temporarily able to suspend my monkey mind and simply experience whatever was going on, I got just the smallest taste of the happiness I’d achieved while on retreat.
Does. America, as then senator Barack Obama had noted after Hurricane Katrina, goes from shock to trance faster than any other nation on earth.
Once you unburden yourself from the delusion that people are deliberately trying to screw you, it’s easier to stop getting carried away.
Ignorance is not bliss.
Often it’s not the unknown that scares us, it’s that we think we know what’s going to happen—and that it’s going to be bad. But the truth is, we really don’t know. The smart play, she said, was to tur...
It’s like, you write a book, you want it to be well received, you want it to be at the top of the bestsellers list, but you have limited control over what happens. You can hire a publicist, you can do...
Make the present moment your friend rather than your enemy. Because many people live habitually as if the present moment were an obstacle that they need to overcome in order to get to the next moment....
Although I tried to always keep in mind something a friend had once told me: Your demons may have been ejected from the building, but they’re out in the parking lot, doing push-ups.) At
I had long assumed that ceaseless planning was the recipe for effectiveness, but Marturano's point was that too much mental churning was counterproductive. When you lurch from one thing to the next, c...
Everyone laughs. Another slogan says, ‘I don’t let anything stand in the way of my pleasure.’ The best one of all, he says, pausing for effect, in a wait-for-it kind of way, chuckling to himself as h...
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