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
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.
Pacing around my office in tight circles, like a Chihuahua doing dressage.
Main thesis was that in a world where everything is constantly changing, we suffer because we cling to things that won’t last.
Does. America, as then senator Barack Obama had noted after Hurricane Katrina, goes from shock to trance faster than any other nation on earth.
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...
We are in the midst of a momentous event in the evolution of human consciousness, but they won’t be talking about it in the news tonight. —Eckhart Tolle, self-help guru
We all have an innate feeling of being separate from the world, peering out at life from behind our own little self, and vying against other isolated selves. But how can we truly be separate from the...
Thoughts calcify into opinions, little seeds of discontent blossom into bad moods, unnoticed back pain makes me inexplicably irritable with anyone who happens to cross my path.
There’s a reason why they call Buddhism advanced common sense; it’s all about methodically confronting obvious-but-often-overlooked truths (everything changes, nothing fully satisfies) until something...
The real superpower of meditation is not just to manage your ego more mindfully but to see that the ego itself has no actual substance. Close your eyes and look for it, and you won’t find any self you...
The habits of a lifetime reassert themselves with astonishing speed.
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...
Meditation suffers from a towering PR problem, largely because its most prominent proponents talk as if they have a perpetual pan flute accompaniment. If
Mark also pointed out that mindfulness was a skill—one that would improve as I got more meditation hours under my belt. In that spirit, he said I should consider going on a retreat.
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....
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...
It seems like you're saying that there is a self-interested, or selfish, case for being compassionate?' 'Yes. Practice of compassion is ultimately benefit to you. So I usually describe: we are selfish...
It makes Buddhism seem supremely dour. Turns out, though, it’s all the result of a translation error. The Pali word dukkha doesn’t actually mean suffering. There’s no perfect word in English, but it’s...
In my view, the balance between stress and contentment was life’s biggest riddle. On the one hand, I was utterly convinced that the continuation of any success I had achieved was contingent upon persi...