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...
Patients saw their health improve if they did volunteer work.
When good things happen, we bake them very quickly into our baseline expectations, and yet the primordial void goes unfilled.
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...
There’s no magic or mysticism required—it’s just exercise. If you do the right amount of reps, certain things will happen, reliably and predictably. One of those things, according to the research, is...
Our entire lives, he argued, are governed by a voice in our heads. This voice is engaged in a ceaseless stream of thinking—most of it negative, repetitive, and self-referential. It squawks away at us...
Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist.
Most of one’s own troubles, worries, and sadness come from self-cherishing, self-centeredness.’ But don’t we need to be somewhat self-centered in order to succeed in life? Self-cherishing, that’s by n...
Just as it’s possible for humans to train to be fast or strong enough to compete in the Olympics, he argued we can practice to be the wisest or most compassionate version of ourselves.
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.
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...
Including salutary effects on the following: • major depression • drug addiction • binge eating • smoking cessation • stress among cancer patients • loneliness among senior citizens • ADHD • asthma • ...
Acknowledged that the Jewish penchant for anxiety probably played a role in their collective attraction to Buddhism. Over the ensuing decades, the Jew-Bus had been a major force in figuring out how to...
With uncontrived sincerity he said, I want to know you. That was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to me.
What’s with you and the whole meditation thing? Trying to avoid another long, unsuccessful answer, I blurted out, I do it because it makes me 10% happier. The look on her face instantly changed. What...
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,...