It helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you back when the mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose exceedingly well. It can be...
It has to do with examining who we are, with questioning our view of the world and our place in it, and with cultivating some appreciation for the fullness of each moment we are alive.
In the old days, if a king didn’t like the message he was given, he would sometimes have the messenger killed. This is tantamount to suppressing your symptoms or your feelings because they are unwante...
For while we are now blessed with 24/7 connectivity so we can be in touch with anybody anywhere at any time, we may be finding, ironically enough, that it is more difficult than ever to actually be in...
Feeling threatened can easily lead to feelings of anger and hostility and from there to outright aggressive behavior, driven by deep instincts to protect your position and maintain your sense of thing...
Curiously, just as much if not more mindless behavior can creep into our most momentous closures and life transitions, including our own aging and our own dying. Here, too, mindfulness can have healin...
Citing both the Buddha and Aristotle, Sachs makes the case for a middle path, a path of moderation and balance between work and non-work (what he calls, quaintly in this day and age, leisure), savings...
Can we be in touch with our own life unfolding? Can we rise to the occasion of our own humanity? Can we take on the challenges we meet, even seeking them out to test ourselves, to grow, to act in a pr...
Buckminster Fuller, the discoverer/inventor of the geodesic dome, at age thirty-two contemplated suicide for a few hours one night at the edge of Lake Michigan, as the story goes, after a series of bu...
Breathe and let be. [...] [G]ive yourself permission to allow this moment to be exactly as it is, and allow yourself to be exactly as you are.
Because of this inner busyness, which is going on almost all the time, we are liable either to miss a lot of the texture of our life experience or to discount its value and meaning.
As we just saw, in this learning process we assume from the start that as long as you are breathing, there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter how ill or how despairing you may be fe...
As much as I can, I avoid using the word spiritual altogether. I find it neither useful nor necessary nor appropriate in my work at the hospital bringing mindfulness into the mainstream of medicine an...
Allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling. [...] Let go of the labels. Just feel what you are feeling, all the while cultivating moment-to-moment awareness, riding the waves of up and down, good...
After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else in this moment, patience takes care of itself.
We are simply inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and rig...
Paying attention on purpose in the present moment and non-judgmentally.
Any change that comes about in your life will be primarily because of your own efforts
[R]emain open to not knowing, perhaps allowing yourself to come to the point of admitting, I don't know, and then experimenting with relaxing a bit into this not knowing instead of condemning yourself...
[L]ive life as if each moment was important, as if each moment counted and could be worked with, even if it was a moment of pain, sadness, despair, or fear. This work involves above all the regular, d...