Ignorance is not bliss.
If anything, mindfulness brought you closer to your neuroses, acting as a sort of Doppler radar, mapping your mental microclimates, making you more insightful, not less. It was the complete opposite o...
I was a frequent mental inventory taker, scanning my consciousness for objects of concern, kind of like pressing a bruise to see if it still hurts.
The slipping away is the whole point. Once you’ve achieved choiceless awareness, you see so clearly how fleeting everything is. Impermanence is no longer theoretical. Tempus fugit isn’t just something...
Pacing around my office in tight circles, like a Chihuahua doing dressage.
You need sandals, bro. You’ll catch gingivitis!
You can’t control what comes up, only how you respond. You
When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.
Turns out, it's pretty simple to win people over, especially in tense situations, if you're able to take their perspective and validate their feelings.
This, as Joseph had pointed out on retreat, is the lie we tell ourselves our whole lives: as soon as we get the next meal, party, vacation, sexual encounter, as soon as we get married, get a promotion...
They had a term, too, for that thing I did where something would bother me and I would immediately project forward to an unpleasant future (e.g., Balding → Unemployment → Flophouse). The Buddhists cal...
The ego is constantly comparing itself to others. It has us measuring our self-worth against the looks, wealth, and social status of everyone else.
Striving is fine, as long as it’s tempered by the realization that, in an entropic universe, the final outcome is out of your control. If you don’t waste your energy on variables you cannot influence,...
Picture the mind like a waterfall, they said: the water is the torrent of thoughts and emotions; mindfulness is the space behind the waterfall. Again, elegant theory – but, easier said than done.
Perhaps the most powerful Tollean insight into the ego was that it is obsessed with the past and the future, at the expense of the present. We live almost exclusively through memory and anticipation,...
Notwithstanding Ted’s foibles, he’d helped me become utterly at ease around people who said God bless you when I hadn’t sneezed. Increasingly, I even now found myself in the position of defending evan...
Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist.
May you be happy. May you be safe and protected from harm. May you be healthy and strong. May you live with ease.
I’d always assumed that the voice in my head was me: my ghostly internal anchorman, hosting the coverage of my life, engaged in an unsolicited stream of insensitive questions and obnoxious color comme...
It’s not me telling you, she said. It’s neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can’t do...